Evolution of cooperation and communication skills as a consequence of environment fluctuations

In recent years, there has been growing interest in studying evolutionary games with environmental feedback. Previous studies exclusively focus on two-player games. However, extension to multi-player game is needed to study problems such as microbial cooperation and crowdsourcing collaborations. Here, we study coevolutionary public goods games where strategies coevolve with the multiplication factors of group cooperation. Asymmetry can arise in such environmental feedback, wh...

Coordination games are important to explain efficient and desirable social behavior. Here we study these games by extensive numerical simulation on networked social structures using an evolutionary approach. We show that local network effects may promote selection of efficient equilibria in both pure and general coordination games and may explain social polarization. These results are put into perspective with respect to known theoretical results. The main insight we obtain i...

Under certain circumstances such as lack of information or bounded rationality, human players can take decisions on which strategy to choose in a game on the basis of simple opinions. These opinions can be modified after each round by observing own or others payoff results but can be also modified after interchanging impressions with other players. In this way, the update of the strategies can become a question that goes beyond simple evolutionary rules based on fitness and b...

In this paper we extend the investigation of cooperation in some classical evolutionary games on populations were the network of interactions among individuals is of the scale-free type. We show that the update rule, the payoff computation and, to some extent the timing of the operations, have a marked influence on the transient dynamics and on the amount of cooperation that can be established at equilibrium. We also study the dynamical behavior of the populations and their e...

The success of modern civilization is built upon widespread cooperation in human society, deciphering the mechanisms behind has being a major goal for centuries. A crucial fact is, however, largely missing in most prior studies that games in the real world are typically played simultaneously and interactively rather than separately as assumed. Here we introduce the idea of interacting games that different games coevolve and influence each other's decision-making. We show that...

The emergence of cooperation among self-interested agents has been a key concern of the multi-agent systems community for decades. With the increased importance of network-mediated interaction, researchers have shifted the attention on the impact of social networks and their dynamics in promoting or hindering cooperation, drawing various context-dependent conclusions. For example, some lines of research, theoretical and experimental, suggest the existence of a threshold effec...

Game theory provides a quantitative framework for analyzing the behavior of rational agents. The Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma in particular has become a standard model for studying cooperation and cheating, with cooperation often emerging as a robust outcome in evolving populations. Here we extend evolutionary game theory by allowing players' strategies as well as their payoffs to evolve in response to selection on heritable mutations. In nature, many organisms engage in mutua...

Fluctuating environments are situations where the spatio-temporal stochasticity plays a significant role in the evolutionary dynamics. The study of the evolution of cooperation in these environments typically assumes a homogeneous, well mixed population, whose constituents are endowed with identical capabilities. In this paper, we generalize these results by developing a systematic study for the cooperation dynamics in fluctuating environments under the consideration of struc...

The environment has a strong influence on a population's evolutionary dynamics. Driven by both intrinsic and external factors, the environment is subject to continual change in nature. To capture an ever-changing environment, we consider a model of evolutionary dynamics with game transitions, where individuals' behaviors together with the games they play in one time step influence the games to be played next time step. Within this model, we study the evolution of cooperation ...

Starting with Darwin, biologists have asked how populations evolve from a low fitness state that is evolutionarily stable to a high fitness state that is not. Specifically of interest is the emergence of cooperation and multicellularity where the fitness of individuals often appears in conflict with that of the population. Theories of social evolution and evolutionary game theory have produced a number of fruitful results employing two-state two-body frameworks. In this study...