Related papers: Public good diffusion limits microbial mutualism

Evolutionary game theory is an abstract and simple, but very powerful way to model evolutionary dynamics. Even complex biological phenomena can sometimes be abstracted to simple two-player games. But often, the interaction between several…

Microbial ecosystems are commonly modeled by fixed interactions between species in steady exponential growth states. However, microbes often modify their environments so strongly that they are forced out of the exponential state into…

Cooperation arises in nature at every scale, from within cells to entire ecosystems. In the framework of evolutionary game theory, public goods games (PGGs) are used to analyse scenarios where individuals can cooperate or defect, and can…

The literature on evolutionary game theory suggests that pure strategies that are strictly dominated by other pure strategies always become extinct under imitative game dynamics, but they can survive under innovative dynamics. As we…

Microbial communities feature an immense diversity of species and this diversity is linked with outcomes ranging from ecosystem stability to medical prognoses. Yet the mechanisms underlying microbial diversity are under debate. While simple…

Conventional noncooperative game theory hypothesizes that the joint strategy of a set of players in a game must satisfy an "equilibrium concept". All other joint strategies are considered impossible; the only issue is what equilibrium…

The paper is concerned with different types of dispersal chosen by competing species. We introduce a model with the diffusion-type term $\nabla \cdot \left[ a \nabla \left( u/P \right) \right]$ which includes some previously studied systems…

We study a system of self-propelled, proliferating finite-size disks with game-theoretical interactions, where growth rates depend on local population composition. We analyze how these interactions influence spatial distribution,…

We study bacterial diffusion in disordered porous media. Interactions with obstacles, at unknown locations, make this problem challenging. We approach it by abstracting the environment to cell states with memoryless transitions. With this,…

Prevalence of cooperation within groups of selfish individuals is puzzling in that it contradicts with the basic premise of natural selection. Favoring players with higher fitness, the latter is key for understanding the challenges faced by…

The evolution of cooperation has been a perennial problem for evolutionary biology because cooperation is undermined by selfish cheaters (or "free riders") that profit from cooperators but do not invest any resources themselves. In a purely…

We extend recent analyses of stochastic effects in game dynamical learning to cases of multi-player games, and to games defined on networked structures. By means of an expansion in the noise strength we consider the weak-noise limit, and…

The emergence of collective cooperation in competitive environments is a well-known phenomenon in biology, economics, and social systems. While most evolutionary game models focus on the evolution of strategies for a fixed game, how…

Why, contrary to theoretical predictions, do marine microbe communities harbor tremendous phenotypic heterogeneity? How can so many marine microbe species competing in the same niche coexist? We discovered a unifying explanation for both…

Evolutionary game theory has impacted many fields of research by providing a mathematical framework for studying the evolution and maintenance of social and moral behaviors. This success is owed in large part to the demonstration that the…

Here, we study the evolution of specialization using realistic computer simulations of bacteria that secrete two public goods in a dynamic fluid. Through this first principles approach, we find physical factors such as diffusion, flow…

Evolutionary game dynamics describes the spreading of successful strategies in a population of reproducing individuals. Typically, the microscopic definition of strategy spreading is stochastic, such that the dynamics becomes deterministic…

Motivated by the observation that anomalous diffusion is a realistic feature in the dynamics of biological populations, we investigate its implications in a paradigmatic model for the evolution of a single species density $u(x,t)$. The…

Understanding the evolution of cooperation in multiplayer games is of vital significance for natural and social systems. An important challenge is that group interactions often leads to nonlinear synergistic effects. However, previous…

Evolutionary games on networks traditionally involve the same game at each interaction. Here we depart from this assumption by considering mixed games, where the game played at each interaction is drawn uniformly at random from a set of two…