Coevolutionary games—A mini review

Abstract

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 cooperators when competing with defectors. Evolutionary game theory provides a competent theoretical framework for addressing the subtleties of cooperation in such situations, which are known as social dilemmas. Recent advances point towards the fact that the evolution of strategies alone may be insufficient to fully exploit the benefits offered by cooperative behavior. Indeed, while spatial structure and heterogeneity, for example, have been recognized as potent promoters of cooperation, coevolutionary rules can extend the potentials of such entities further, and even more importantly, lead to the understanding of their emergence. The introduction of coevolutionary rules to evolutionary games implies, that besides the evolution of strategies, another property may simultaneously be subject to evolution as well. Coevolutionary rules may affect the interaction network, the reproduction capability of players, their reputation, mobility or age. Here we review recent works on evolutionary games incorporating coevolutionary rules, as well as give a didactic description of potential pitfalls and misconceptions associated with the subject. In addition, we briefly outline directions for future research that we feel are promising, thereby particularly focusing on dynamical effects of coevolutionary rules on the evolution of cooperation, which are still widely open to research and thus hold promise of exciting new discoveries.

Combination with anti-tit-for-tat remedies problems of tit-for-tat

“…In many studies, reciprocity is a particularly important idea to explain cooperation between rational players. In the iterated version of the Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) game, the repetition makes it profitable for each player to cooperate because one has to take the other's reaction into account [1,2,3,4,5,6]. As long as both are sufficiently patient and free from error, therefore, the players cooperate from the first encounter and this continues forever.…”

Multiplicative noise enhances spatial reciprocity

“…When mapping the heterogeneous strategy transfer capability to age structure, the robust promotion of cooperation was reported [51]. Moreover, the heterogeneity diversity of players allowed for cooperative behavior to prevail even if the temptations to defect were large [24]. Recently, it was shown if noise was involved into the payoffs of different strategies, cooperation was largely enhanced as well [52].…”

Cooperation and cheating in microbial exoenzyme production – Theoretical analysis for biotechnological applications

“…The strategies correspond to genetic or epigenetic states, and switches between them can occur, for example, by mutations or gene silencing, respectively. Evolutionary game theory [14][15][16][17][18] can be used to determine equilibrium states of the population (i.e., mixtures of strategies) when the fitness of an organism depends not only on its own strategy but also on the strategies of others. That theory has been used for analyzing many properties of living organisms such as sex ratios [14], the evolution of cooperation [16,[18][19][20], biofilms [21], and the selection of biochemical pathways [22,23].…”

“…Thus, much work has been done on how cooperation can evolve in a Prisoner's Dilemma setting, for example, by stochastic or spatial effects or iteration of the game [15,16,26,27]. Another game is the snowdrift game, also known as game of chicken or hawk-dove game [14,15,18,20]. The name snowdrift originates from a cover story in which two car drivers got stuck in a blizzard, and shoveling snow by one of them is sufficient for both to move on.There, cooperation occurs naturally because that game leads to two Nash equilibria, in which one player cooperates and the other one defects.…”