Evolutionary dynamics of general group interactions in structured populations

Abstract

The evolution of populations is influenced by many factors, and the simple classical models have been developed in a number of important ways. Both population structure and multiplayer interactions have been shown to significantly affect the evolution of important properties, such as the level of cooperation or of aggressive behavior. Here we combine these two key factors and develop the evolutionary dynamics of general group interactions in structured populations represented by regular graphs. The traditional linear and threshold public goods games are adopted as models to address the dynamics. We show that for linear group interactions, population structure can favor the evolution of cooperation compared to the well-mixed case, and we see that the more neighbors there are, the harder it is for cooperators to persist in structured populations. We further show that threshold group interactions could lead to the emergence of cooperation even in well-mixed populations. Here population structure sometimes inhibits cooperation for the threshold public goods game, where depending on the benefit to cost ratio, the outcomes are bistability or a monomorphic population of defectors or cooperators. Our results suggest, counterintuitively, that structured populations are not always beneficial for the evolution of cooperation for nonlinear group interactions.

Coevolutionary dynamics of aspiration and strategy in spatial repeated public goods games

“…If not stated otherwise, interactions take place following this way throughout this study. Figure 1 shows that the fraction of cooperators exhibits a monotonous increasing dependence upon δ, one result widely reported in spatial public goods game [35][36][37][38][39]32]. This result still holds for repeated interactions such as L=3, 5, and 10.…”

Understanding spatial public goods games on three-layer networks

“…To understand how a real-world population escapes from this cooperation dilemma, from the perspective of realistic societies, researchers have extended the simple PGG model in various ways, such as the PGG with a success threshold [5][6][7][8] and the PGG ultilizing continuous investment [9][10][11][12]. Besides, several mechanisms such as reward and punishment [13][14][15][16][17][18][19], reputation [13,20], have been demonstrated to facilitate the evolution of cooperation.…”

Interactive diversity promotes the evolution of cooperation in structured populations

“…Resorting to the powerful mathematical framework of evolutionary game theory, researchers have invested much effort in exploring this problem [3][4][5][6][7][8]. Since the seminal work on spatial games [9], traditional explorations of the evolution of cooperation on ideal structureless (well-mixed) populations [3][4][5][6] are moved to structured cases where individuals are constrained to play with their first or second order of neighbors [10][11][12][13][14][15]. With the discovery of topologies embedded in human interactions in the real society [16][17][18][19], many further investigations have been carried out in various complex networks where nodes indicate individuals and links represent neighborhoods [20][21][22][23].…”