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This paper studies optimal consumption and saving decisions under uncertainty about the transition dynamics of the economic environment. We consider a general optimal savings problem in which the exogenous state governing discounting,…
Models in evolutionary game theory traditionally assume symmetric interactions in homogeneous environments. Here, we consider populations evolving in a heterogeneous environment, which consists of patches of different qualities that are…
Asymmetric evolutionary games, such as the Ultimatum Game, provide keys to understanding the emergence of fairness in social species. Building on this framework, we explore the evolution of social value systems and the operational role that…
The evolution of preferences that account for other agents' fitness, or other-regarding preferences, has been modeled with the "indirect approach" to evolutionary game theory. Under the indirect evolutionary approach, agents make decisions…
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…
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…
We examine the evolutionary basis for risk aversion with respect to aggregate risk. We study populations in which agents face choices between alternatives with different levels of aggregate risk. We show that the choices that maximize the…
The distribution of cultural variants in a population is shaped by both neutral evolutionary dynamics and by selection pressures, which include several individual cognitive biases, demographic factors and social network structures. 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…
The universal prevalence of cooperation is puzzling, as defection typically yields higher payoffs than cooperation, motivating searches for hidden pathways to cooperation. Here we study a game-theoretic model on a lattice structured…
The environment undergoes perpetual changes that are influenced by a combination of endogenous and exogenous factors. Consequently, it exerts a substantial influence on an individual's physical and psychological state, directly or…
A generic property of biological, social and economical networks is their ability to evolve in time, creating and suppressing interactions. We approach this issue within the framework of an adaptive network of agents playing a Prisoner's…
Long-term evolutionary processes can strongly influence common-pool resource conservation by generating new traits or behaviours that modify the feedback between population strategies and the resource state. Here we develop an…
Kin selection and direct reciprocity are two most basic mechanisms for promoting cooperation in human society. Generalizing the standard models of the multi-player Prisoner's Dilemma and the Public Goods games for heterogeneous populations,…
In multi-agent environments in which coordination is desirable, the history of play often causes lock-in at sub-optimal outcomes. Notoriously, technologies with a significant environmental footprint or high social cost persist despite the…
Exploiting others is beneficial individually but it could also be detrimental globally. The reverse is also true: a higher cooperation level may change the environment in a way that is beneficial for all competitors. To explore the possible…
Various social contexts ranging from public goods provision to information collection can be depicted as games of strategic interactions, where a player's well-being depends on her own action as well as on the actions taken by her…
Global change is reshaping ecosystems and societies. Strategic choices that were best yesterday may be sub-optimal tomorrow; and environmental conditions that were once taken for granted may soon cease to exist. In this setting, how people…
Evolutionary game theory has been successfully used to investigate the dynamics of systems, in which many entities have competitive interactions. From a physics point of view, it is interesting to study conditions under which a coordination…
We examine the effect of noise on societies of agents using an agent-based model of evolutionary norm emergence. Generally, we see that noisy societies are more selfish, smaller and discontent, and are caught in rounds of perpetual…