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Cooperative behaviors are defined as the production of common goods benefitting all members of the community at the producer's cost. They could seem to be in contradiction with natural selection, as non-cooperators have an increased fitness…

When group members claim a portion of limited resources, it is tempting to invest more effort to get a larger share. However, if everyone acts similarly, they all get the same piece they would obtain without extra effort. This is the…

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…

Here we introduce a model in which individuals differ in the rate at which they seek new interactions with others, making rational decisions modeled as general symmetric two-player games. Once a link between two individuals has formed, the…

Real social interactions occur on networks in which each individual is connected to some, but not all, of others. In social dilemma games with a fixed population size, heterogeneity in the number of contacts per player is known to promote…

Natural and human-made common goods present key challenges due to their susceptibility to degradation, overuse, or congestion. We explore the self-organisation of their usage when individuals have access to several available commons but…

Collective cooperation drives the dynamics of many natural, social, and economic phenomena, making understanding the evolution of cooperation with evolutionary game theory a central question of modern science. Although human interactions…

In the commons, communities whose growth depends on public goods, individuals often rely on surprisingly simple strategies, or heuristics, to decide whether to contribute to the common good (at risk of exploitation by free-riders). Although…

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…

Evolving one-dimensional cellular automata (CAs) with genetic algorithms has provided insight into how improved performance on a task requiring global coordination emerges when only local interactions are possible. Two approaches that can…

Cooperation and defection are social traits whose evolutionary origin is still unresolved. Recent behavioral experiments with humans suggested that strategy changes are driven mainly by the individuals' expectations and not by imitation.…

A set of economic entities embedded in a network graph collaborate by opportunistically exchanging their resources to satisfy their dynamically generated needs. Under what conditions their collaboration leads to a sustainable economy? Which…

The evolution of cooperation often depends upon population structure, yet nearly all models of cooperation implicitly assume that this structure remains static. This is a simplifying assumption, because most organisms possess genetic traits…

Resource competition is a fundamental interaction in natural communities.However little is known about competition in spatial environments where organisms are able to regulate resource distributions. Here, we analyze the competition of two…

Costly cooperation and costly signaling are both difficult to reconcile with simple fitness maximization, yet both are common in biological and social systems. We study a model in which agents emit costly signals and condition their actions…

The emergence and maintenance of cooperative behavior is a fascinating topic in evolutionary biology and social science. The public goods game (PGG) is a paradigm for exploring cooperative behavior. In PGG, the total resulting payoff is…

Understanding cooperative behavior in biological and social systems constitutes a scientific challenge, being the object of intense research over the past decades. Many mechanisms have been proposed to explain the presence and persistence…

Evolution of cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma and the public goods game is studied, where initially players belong to two independent structured populations. Simultaneously with the strategy evolution, players whose current utility…

We propose an evolutionary model to study the transition toward green technology under the influence of innovation. Clean and dirty technologies are selected according to their profitability under an environmental tax, which depends on the…

In drylands, water availability determines plant population densities and whether they cooperate via facilitation or compete. When water scarcity intensifies, plant densities decrease and competition for water surpasses the benefits of soil…