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Cooperation is a difficult proposition in the face of Darwinian selection. Those that defect have an evolutionary advantage over cooperators who should therefore die out. However, spatial structure enables cooperators to survive through the…
Populations of species in ecosystems are often constrained by availability of resources within their environment. In effect this means that a growth of one population, needs to be balanced by comparable reduction in populations of others.…
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…
Collective systems that self-organise to maximise the group's ability to collect and distribute information can be successful in environments with high spatial and temporal variation. Such organisations are abundant in nature, as sharing…
Understanding how the structure of community interactions is modified by coevolution is vital for understanding system responses to change at all scales. However, in absence of a group selection process, collective community behaviours…
Competitive exclusion, a key principle of ecology, can be generalized to understand many other complex systems. Individuals under surviving pressure tend to be different from others, and correlations among them change correspondingly to the…
Relations among species in ecosystems can be represented by complex networks where both negative (competition) and positive (mutualism) interactions are concurrently present. Recently, it has been shown that many ecosystems can be cast into…
Sustainable resource use in large societies requires social institutions that specify acceptable behavior and punish violators. Because mutual monitoring becomes prohibitively costly as populations grow, we examine whether sustainability…
Human society and natural environment form a complex giant ecosystem, where human activities not only lead to the change of environmental states, but also react to them. By using collective-risk social dilemma game, some studies have…
Wealthy individuals may be less tempted to defect than those with comparatively low payoffs. To take this into consideration, we introduce coevolutionary success-driven multigames in structured populations. While the core game is always the…
Resource allocation takes place in various kinds of real-world complex systems, such as the traffic systems, social services institutions or organizations, or even the ecosystems. The fundamental principle underlying complex…
Shared resources enhance productivity yet at the same time provide channels for biological and digital contamination, turning physical or digital hygiene into a cooperation dilemma prone to free-riding. Here we introduce a game of…
Numerous living systems are hierarchically organised, whereby replicating components are grouped into reproducing collectives -- e.g., organelles are grouped into cells, and cells are grouped into multicellular organisms. In such systems,…
Living in groups brings benefits to many animals, such as a protection against predators and an improved capacity for sensing and making decisions while searching for resources in uncertain environments. A body of studies has shown how…
Dynamic environments shape diverse dynamics in evolutionary game systems. We introduce spatial heterogeneity of resources into the prisoner's dilemma game model to explore coevolutionary game dynamics with environmental feedback. The…
Global cooperation often falters despite shared objectives, as misaligned interests and unequal incentives undermine collective efforts, such as those in international climate change collaborations. To tackle this issue, this paper…
Human ecological success relies on our characteristic ability to flexibly self-organize into cooperative social groups, the most successful of which employ substantial specialization and division of labor. Unlike most other animals, humans…
A canonical social dilemma arises when finite resources are allocated to a group of people, who can choose to either reciprocate with interest, or keep the proceeds for themselves. What resource allocation mechanisms will encourage levels…
In the study of the evolution of cooperation, resource limitations are usually assumed just to provide a finite population size. Recently, however, it has been pointed out that resource limitation may also generate dynamical payoffs able to…
Recent empirical studies suggest that heavy-tailed distributions of human activities are universal in real social dynamics [Muchnik, \emph{et al.}, Sci. Rep. \textbf{3}, 1783 (2013)]. On the other hand, community structure is ubiquitous in…