This is an introduction to the special issue titled "Collective behavior and evolutionary games" that is in the making at Chaos, Solitons & Fractals. The term collective behavior covers many different phenomena in nature and society. From bird flocks and fish swarms to social movements and herding effects, it is the lack of a central planner that makes the spontaneous emergence of sometimes beautifully ordered and seemingly meticulously designed behavior all the more sensational and intriguing. The goal of the special issue is to attract submissions that identify unifying principles that describe the essential aspects of collective behavior, and which thus allow for a better interpretation and foster the understanding of the complexity arising in such systems. As the title of the special issue suggests, the later may come from the realm of evolutionary games, but this is certainly not a necessity, neither for this special issue, and certainly not in general. Interdisciplinary work on all aspects of collective behavior, regardless of background and motivation, and including synchronization and human cognition, is very welcome.
We study a model of a spatial evolutionary game, based on the Prisoner's dilemma for two regular arrangements of players, on a square lattice and on a triangular lattice. We analyze steady state distributions of players which evolve from irregular, random initial configurations. We find significant differences between the square and triangular lattice, and we characterize the geometric structures which emerge on the triangular lattice.
Effects of Stochastic Games on Evolutionary Dynamics in Structured Populations
College of Artificial Intelligence, Southwest University（西南大学人工智能学院）；Business College, Southwest University（西南大学商学院）；Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, University of Maribor（马里博尔大学自然科学与数学学院）；Community Healthcare Center Dr. Adolf Drolc Maribor（马里博尔市阿道夫·德罗尔克博士社区健康中心）；Department of Physics, Kyung Hee University（庆熙大学物理系）；University College, Korea University（韩国大学大学院）；Institute of Technical Physics and Materials Science, Centre for Energy Research（能源研究中心技术物理与材料科学研究所）
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, where games organized by focal cooperators may have a different efficiency than the ones by defectors. Our analysis shows …
We introduce an evolutionary game on hypergraphs in which decisions between a risky alternative and a safe one are taken in social groups of different sizes. The model naturally reproduces choice shifts, namely the differences between the preference of individual decision makers and the consensual choice of a group, that have been empirically observed in choice dilemmas. In particular, a deviation from the Nash equilibrium towards the risky strategy occurs when the dynamics takes place on heterogeneous hypergraphs. These results can explain the emergence of irrational herding and radical behav…
Understanding the origins of volunteerism and free-riding is crucial in collective action situations where a sufficient number of cooperators is necessary to achieve shared benefits, such as in vaccination campaigns and social change movements. Despite the importance of attaining behavior consistency for successful collective action, the theoretical mechanisms behind this process remain largely elusive. Here, we address this issue by studying the evolutionary dynamics of individual cooperativity levels in multi-round threshold public goods games. By using adaptive dynamics, we explore how indi…
The evolution of cooperation among unrelated individuals in human and animal societies remains a challenging issue across disciplines. It is an important subject also in the evolutionary game theory to research how cooperation arises. The subject has been extensively studied especially in Prisonars' dilemma game(PD) and the emergence of cooperation is important subject also in public goods game(PGG). In this article, we consider evolutionary PGG on complex networks where the topology of the networks varies under the infulence of game dynamics. Then we study what effects on the evolution of pla…
The interactions between players of prisoner's dilemma (PD) game are reconstructed with evolutionary game data. All participants play the game with their counterparts and gain corresponding rewards during each round of the game. However, their strategies are updated asynchronously during the evolutionary PD game. Two inference methods of the interactions between players are derived with naive mean-field (nMF) approximation and maximum log-likelihood estimation (MLE) respectively. The two methods are tested numerically also for fully connected asymmetric Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) models, var…
An evolutionary game model is developed to study the interplay between consumers and producers when trade takes place on an e-commerce marketplace. The type of delivery service available and consumers' taste are particularly important regarding both game payoffs and players' strategies. The game payoff matrix is then adapted to analyse the different trading patterns that were developed during the COVID-19 pandemic in both the traditional retail and e-commerce sectors. In contrast to the former, investment in logistics and warehouses in the e-commerce sector allowed for the emergence of a trend…
In this letter, we deal with evolutionary game theoretic learning processes for population games on networks with dynamically evolving communities. Specifically, we propose a novel mathematical framework in which a deterministic, continuous-time replicator equation on a community network is coupled with a closed dynamic flow process between communities that is governed by an environmental feedback mechanism, resulting in co-evolutionary dynamics. Through a rigorous analysis of the system of differential equations obtained, we characterize the equilibria of the coupled dynamical system. Moreove…
Tiny perturbations may trigger large responses in systems near criticality, shifting them across equilibria. Committed minorities are suggested to be responsible for the emergence of collective behaviors in many physical, social, and biological systems. Using evolutionary game theory, we address the question whether a finite fraction of zealots can drive the system to large-scale coordination. We find that a tipping point exists in coordination games, whereas the same phenomenon depends on the selection pressure, update rule, and network structure in other types of games. Our study paves the w…
Governments and enterprises strongly rely on incentives to generate favorable outcomes from social and strategic interactions between individuals. The incentives are usually modeled by payoffs in evolutionary games, such as the prisoner's dilemma or the harmony game, with imitation dynamics. Adjusting the incentives by changing the payoff parameters can favor cooperation, as found in the harmony game, over defection, which prevails in the prisoner's dilemma. Here, we show that this is not always the case if individuals engage in strategic interactions in multiple domains. In particular, we inv…
In this paper we study the problem of approximating the general solution to an optimal control problem whose dynamics arise from a $2\times 2$ skew-symmetric evolutionary game with arbitrary initial condition. Our approach uses a Fourier approximation method and generalizes prior work in the use of orthogonal function approximation for optimal control. At the same time we cast the fitting problem in the context of a non-standard feedforward neural network and derive the back-propagation operator in this context. An example of the efficacy of this approach is provided and generalizations are di…
Collective, especially group-based, managerial decision making is crucial in organizations. Using an evolutionary theoretic approach to collective decision making, agent-based simulations were conducted to investigate how human collective decision making would be affected by the agents' diversity in problem understanding and/or behavior in discussion, as well as by their social network structure. Simulation results indicated that groups with consistent problem understanding tended to produce higher utility values of ideas and displayed better decision convergence, but only if there was no grou…
