Related papers: Community-level cohesion without cooperation

We analyze an interacting particle system with a Markov evolution of birth-and-death type. We have shown that a local competition mechanism (realized via a density dependent mortality) leads to a globally regular behavior of the population…

How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism for…

Recently, numerous community search methods for large graphs have been proposed, at the core of which is defining and measuring cohesion. This paper experimentally evaluates the effectiveness of these community search algorithms w.r.t.…

Social dilemmas are an integral part of social interactions. Cooperative actions, ranging from secreting extra-cellular products in microbial populations to donating blood in humans, are costly to the actor and hence create an incentive to…

Cooperative behavior is widespread in nature, even though cooperating individuals always run the risk to be exploited by free-riders. Population structure effectively promotes cooperation given that a threshold in the level of cooperation…

Ecosystems are commonly conceptualized as networks of interacting species. However, partitioning natural diversity of organisms into discrete units is notoriously problematic, and mounting experimental evidence raises the intriguing…

Cooperation is prevalent in nature, not only in the context of social interactions within the animal kingdom, but also on the cellular level. In cancer for example, tumour cells can cooperate by producing growth factors. The evolution of…

People's cooperation in adopting protective measures is effective in epidemic control and creates herd immunity as a public good. Similarly, the presence of an epidemic is a driving factor for the formation and improvement of cooperation.…

Many scientific collaboration networks exhibit clear community and small world structures. However, the studies on the underlying mechanisms for the formation and evolution of community and small world structures are still insufficient. The…

We discuss the relevance of studying ecology within the framework of Complexity Science from a statistical mechanics approach. Ecology is concerned with understanding how systems level properties emerge out of the multitude of interactions…

The emergence of cooperation among self-interested agents has been a key concern of the multi-agent systems community for decades. With the increased importance of network-mediated interaction, researchers have shifted the attention on the…

Configurational arrangement of network architecture and interaction character of individuals are two most influential factors on the mechanisms underlying the evolutionary outcome of cooperation, which is explained by the well-established…

Ecological resilience refers to the ability of a system to retain its state when subject to state variables perturbations or parameter changes. While understanding and quantifying resilience is crucial to anticipate the possible regime…

Cooperation among unrelated individuals is frequently observed in social groups when their members combine efforts and resources to obtain a shared benefit that is unachievable by an individual alone. However, understanding why cooperation…

Regular vegetation patterns in semiarid ecosystems are believed to arise from the interplay between long-range competition and facilitation processes acting at smaller distances. We show that, under rather general conditions, long-range…

Unstoppable feedback loops and tipping points in socio-ecological systems are the main threats to sustainability. These behaviors have been extensively studied, notably to predict, and arguably deviate, dead-end trajectories. Behind the…

Dynamics of a social population is analyzed taking into account some physical constraints on individual behavior and decision making abilities. The model, based on Evolutionary Game Theory, predicts that a population has to pass through a…

We study the stochastic evolution of four species in cyclic competition in a well mixed environment. In systems composed of a finite number $N$ of particles these simple interaction rules result in a rich variety of extinction scenarios,…

Persistent economic competition is often justified as a mechanism of innovation, efficiency, and welfare maximization. Yet empirical evidence across disciplines reveals that competition systematically generates fragility, inequality, and…

We investigate how the pattern of contacts between species in mutualistic ecosystems is affected by the phylogenetic proximity between the species of each guild. We develop several theoretical tools to measure that effect and we use them to…