Related papers: Risk aversion as an evolutionary adaptation
Direct reciprocity is a mechanism for the evolution of cooperation in repeated social interactions. According to this literature, individuals naturally learn to adopt conditionally cooperative strategies if they have multiple encounters…
The spread of disinformation poses a significant threat to societal well-being. We analyze this phenomenon using an evolutionary game theory model of the sender-receiver game, where senders aim to mislead receivers and receivers aim to…
How cooperation emerges in human societies is still a puzzle. Evolutionary game theory has been the standard framework to address this issue. In most models, every individual plays with all others, and then reproduce and die according to…
The underlying idea behind the construction of indices of economic inequality is based on measuring deviations of various portions of low incomes from certain references or benchmarks, that could be point measures like population mean or…
Evolutionary game dynamics in finite populations provides a new framework to understand the selection of traits with frequency-dependent fitness. Recently, a simple but fundamental law of evolutionary dynamics, which we call {\sigma} law,…
Understanding how biological organisms make decisions is of fundamental importance in understanding behavior. Such an understanding within evolutionary game theory so far has been sought by appealing to bounded rationality. Here, we present…
The most common assumption in evolutionary game theory is that players should adopt a strategy that warrants the highest payoff. However, recent studies indicate that the spatial selection for cooperation is enhanced if an appropriate…
The idea of incompetence as a learning or adaptation function was introduced in the context of evolutionary games as a fixed parameter. However, live organisms usually perform different nonlinear adaptation functions such as a power law or…
Game theory provides a quantitative framework for analyzing the behavior of rational agents. The Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma in particular has become a standard model for studying cooperation and cheating, with cooperation often emerging as…
In many countries financial service providers have to elicit their customers risk preferences, when offering products and services. For instance, in the Netherlands pension funds will be legally obliged to factor in their clients risk…
Models for epidemic spread typically account for variable risk factors but do not account for the correlation between behavior and risk. Here we extend these models to account for such correlations. We find that a positive correlation…
Risk perception plays a key role in shaping the collective behavior of moving animal groups, yet the effects of variation in perceived risk within groups is unknown. Here, we merge two subgroups of fish with different levels of perceived…
Many studies have analyzed how variability in reproductive success affects fitness. However, each study tends to focus on a particular problem, leaving unclear the overall structure of variability in populations. This fractured conceptual…
Groups of humans are often able to find ways to cooperate with one another in complex, temporally extended social dilemmas. Models based on behavioral economics are only able to explain this phenomenon for unrealistic stateless matrix…
Cultures around the world show varying levels of conservatism. While maintaining traditional ideas prevents wrong ones from being embraced, it also slows or prevents adaptation to new times. Without exploration there can be no improvement,…
Many life-history traits, like the age at maturity or adult longevity, are important determinants of the generation time. For instance, semelparous species whose adults reproduce once and die have shorter generation times than iteroparous…
The evolution of cooperation often depends upon population structure, yet nearly all models of cooperation implicitly assume that this structure remains static. This is a simplifying assumption, because most organisms possess genetic traits…
In economics, risk aversion is modeled via a concave Bernoulli utility within the expected-utility paradigm. We propose a simple test of expected utility and concavity. We find little support for either: only 30 percent of the choices are…
Financial asset markets are sociotechnical systems whose constituent agents are subject to evolutionary pressure as unprofitable agents exit the marketplace and more profitable agents continue to trade assets. Using a population of evolving…
Distributional reinforcement learning (RL) -- in which agents learn about all the possible long-term consequences of their actions, and not just the expected value -- is of great recent interest. One of the most important affordances of a…