The emergence of kinship behavior in structured populations of unrelated individuals

Avner Shaked (), Ilan Eshel and Emilia Sansone
Additional contact information
Avner Shaked: Economics Department, Bonn University, 24 Adenauerallee, D-53113 Bonn, Germany
Ilan Eshel: Department of Statistics, School of Mathematical Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
Emilia Sansone: Department of Mathematics and its Applications, University of Naples, I-80138 Naples, Italy

International Journal of Game Theory, 1999, vol. 28, issue 4, 447-463

Abstract: The paper provides an explanation for altruistic behavior based on the matching and learning technology in the population. In a infinite structured population, in which individuals meet and interact with their neighbors, individuals learn by imitating their more successful neighbors. We ask which strategies are robust against invasion of mutants: A strategy is unbeatable if when all play it and a finite group of identical mutants enters then the learning process eliminates the mutants with probability 1. We find that such an unbeatable strategy is necessarily one in which each individual behaves as if he is related to his neighbors and takes into account their welfare as well as his. The degree to which he cares depends on the radii of his neighborhoods.

Keywords: Population; dynamics; ·; Local; interaction; ·; altruism; ·; inclusive; fitness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999-12-15
Note: Received June 1996/Revised version October 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00182/papers/9028004/90280447.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jogath:v:28:y:1999:i:4:p:447-463

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... eory/journal/182/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Game Theory is currently edited by Shmuel Zamir, Vijay Krishna and Bernhard von Stengel

More articles in International Journal of Game Theory from Springer, Game Theory Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().