Related papers: Nice guys don't always finish last: succeeding in …

We study contests in which two groups compete to win (or not to win) a group-specific public-good/bad prize. Each player in the groups can exert two types of effort: one to help her own group win the prize, and one to sabotage her own…

Teamwork is vital in many settings, and it is socially beneficial for teams to cooperate in some situations (``good games'') and not in others (``bad games;'' e.g., those that allow for corruption). A team's cooperation in any given game…

The structure of a society depends, to some extent, on the incentives of the individuals they are composed of. We study a stylized model of this interplay, that suggests that the more individuals aim at climbing the social hierarchy, the…

Emergence of hierarchies is investigated by Monte Carlo simulation in a timid society where all individuals are pacifist. The self-organiztion of hierarchies is shown to occur in two steps as the population is increased, i.e. there are…

Pro-social punishment is a key driver of harmonious and stable society. However, this institution is vulnerable to corruption since law-violators can avoid sanctioning by paying bribes to corrupt law-enforcers. Consequently, to understand…

In a social dilemma situation, where individual and collective interests are in conflict, it sounds a reasonable assumption that the presence of super or smart players, who simultaneously punish defection and reward cooperation without…

The basic problem in the cooperation theory is to justify the cooperation. Here we propose a new approach, where players are driven by their altruism to cooperate or not. The probability of cooperation depends also on the co-player's…

Social hierarchy is important that can not be ignored in human socioeconomic activities and in the animal world. Here we incorporate this factor into the evolutionary game to see what impact it could have on the cooperation outcome. The…

In the traditional setup of public goods game all players are involved in every available groups and the mutual benefit is shared among competing cooperator and defector strategies. But in real life situations the group formation of players…

Inspired by the fact that people have diverse propensities to punish wrongdoers, we study a spatial public goods game with defectors and different types of punishing cooperators. During the game, cooperators punish defectors with…

We analyze the dynamics of competitions with a large number of players. In our model, n players compete against each other and the winner is decided based on the standings: in each competition, the mth ranked player wins. We solve for the…

We consider two-player iterated survival games in which players may switch from a more cooperative behavior to a less cooperative one at some step of the game. Payoffs are survival probabilities and lone individuals have to finish the game…

Situations where individuals have to contribute to joint efforts or share scarce resources are ubiquitous. Yet, without proper mechanisms to ensure cooperation, the evolutionary pressure to maximize individual success tends to create a…

Patterns of wins and losses in pairwise contests, such as occur in sports and games, consumer research and paired comparison studies, and human and animal social hierarchies, are commonly analyzed using probabilistic models that allow one…

We study the effects of randomness on competitions based on an elementary random process in which there is a finite probability that a weaker team upsets a stronger team. We apply this model to sports leagues and sports tournaments, and…

Social, biological and economic networks grow and decline with occasional fragmentation and re-formation, often explained in terms of external perturbations. We show that these phenomena can be a direct consequence of simple imitation and…

Ethics play an important role in determining the behavior of an individual under certain circumstances. Ethical or unethical behavior can be treated as a strategy of a player in a pay-off game. In this paper, we present two analytical…

The iterated prisoner's dilemma is a game that produces many counter-intuitive and complex behaviors in a social environment, based on very simple basic rules. It illustrates that cooperation can be a good thing even in a competitive world,…

The basic social dilemma is frequently captured by a public goods game where participants decide simultaneously whether to support a common pool or not and after the enhanced contributions are distributed uniformly among all competitors.…

We study the evolutionary dynamics of the prisoner's dilemma game in which cooperators and defectors interact with another actor type called exiters. Rather than being exploited by defectors, exiters exit the game in favour of a small…