Related papers: Playing it safe: information constrains collective…
In biology and ecology, individuals or communities of individuals living in unpredictable environments often alternate between different evolutionary strategies to spread and reduce risks. Such behavior is commonly referred to as…
Learning from experience is a key feature of decision-making in cognitively complex organisms. Strategic interactions involving Bayesian inferential strategies can enable us to better understand how evolving individual choices to be…
Organisms that grow and survive in uncertain environments may need to change their physiological state as the environment changes. When the environment is uncertain, one strategy known as bet-hedging is to make these changes randomly and…
We consider a simple information-theoretic model of communication, in which two species of bacteria have the option of exchanging information about their environment, thereby improving their chances of survival. For this purpose, we model a…
Biological organisms have to cope with stochastic variations in both the external environment and the internal population dynamics. Theoretical studies and laboratory experiments suggest that population diversification could be an effective…
Empirically, many strategic settings are characterized by stable outcomes in which players' decisions are publicly observed, yet no player takes the opportunity to deviate. To analyze such situations in the presence of incomplete…
Biological populations are subject to fluctuating environmental conditions. Different adaptive strategies can allow them to cope with these fluctuations: specialization to one particular environmental condition, adoption of a generalist…
Any organism is embedded in an environment that changes over time. The timescale for and statistics of environmental change, the precision with which the organism can detect its environment, and the costs and benefits of particular protein…
Hysteresis and bet-hedging (random choice of phenotypes) are two different observations typically linked with multiplicity of phenotypes in biological systems. Hysteresis can be viewed as form of the system's persistent memory of past…
In order to grow in any given environment, bacteria need to collect information about the medium composition and implement suitable growth strategies by adjusting their regulatory and metabolic degrees of freedom. In the standard sense,…
In order to increase their robustness against environmental fluctuations, many biological populations have developed bet-hedging mechanisms in which the population `bets' against the presence of prolonged favorable environmental conditions…
Interactions among individuals in natural populations often occur in a dynamically changing environment. Understanding the role of environmental variation in population dynamics has long been a central topic in theoretical ecology and…
There has been a recent surge of interest in the role of information in strategic interactions. Much of this work seeks to understand how the realized equilibrium of a game is influenced by uncertainty in the environment and the information…
We propose a model of inference and heuristic decision-making in groups that is rooted in the Bayes rule but avoids the complexities of rational inference in partially observed environments with incomplete information, which are…
This work contains the mathematical exploration of a few prototypical games in which central concepts from statistics and probability theory naturally emerge. The first two kinds of games are termed Fisher and Bayesian games, which are…
Strategies for sustaining cooperation and preventing exploitation by selfish agents in repeated games have mostly been restricted to Markovian strategies where the response of an agent depends on the actions in the previous round. Such…
Experimentalists have observed phenotypic variability in isogenic bacteria populations. We explore the hypothesis that in fluctuating environments this variability is tuned to maximize a bacterium's expected log growth rate, potentially…
Bayesian optimal experiments that maximize the information gained from collected data are critical to efficiently identify behavioral models. We extend a seminal method for designing Bayesian optimal experiments by introducing two…
Animals living in groups make movement decisions that depend, among other factors, on social interactions with other group members. Our present understanding of social rules in animal collectives is mainly based on empirical fits to…
Living organisms survive and multiply even though they have uncertain and incomplete information about their environment and imperfect models to predict the consequences of their actions. Bayesian models have been proposed to face this…