COOPERATION, COLLECTIVES FORMATION AND SPECIALIZATION

Christoph Hauert ()
Additional contact information
Christoph Hauert: Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University, One Brattle Square, Cambridge MA 02138, USA

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), 2006, vol. 09, issue 04, 315-335

Abstract: Cooperation in spatial evolutionary game theory has revealed various interesting insights into the problem of the evolution and maintenance of cooperative behavior. In social dilemmas, cooperators create and maintain a common resource at some cost to themselves while defectors attempt to exploit the resource without contributing. This leads to classical conflicts of interest between the individual and the community with the prisoner's dilemma as the most prominent mathematical metaphor to describe such situations. The evolutionary fate of cooperators and defectors sensitively depends on the interaction structure of the population. In spatially extended populations, the ability to form clusters or collectives often supports cooperation by limiting exploitation to the cluster boundaries but often collectives formation may also inhibit or even eliminate cooperation by hindering the dispersal of cooperators. Another attempt at resolving the conflict of interest allows individuals to drop out of unpromising public enterprises and hence changes compulsory interactions into voluntary participation. This leads to a cyclic dominance of cooperators, defectors and loners that do not participate and gives rise to oscillatory dynamics which again subtly depends on the population structure. Here we review recent advances in the dynamics of cooperation in structured populations as well as in situations where cooperative investments vary continuously. In such continuous games, the evolutionary dynamics driven by mutation and selection can lead to spontaneous diversification and specialization into high and low investing individuals which provides a natural explanation for the origin of cooperators and defectors.

Keywords: Evolutionary game theory; spatial structure; social dilemmas; synchronization; oscillations; evolutionary branching; tragedy of the commons; tragedy of the commune; public goods games; prisoner's dilemma; voluntary participation; continuous games (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0219525906000847
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

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:wsi:acsxxx:v:09:y:2006:i:04:n:s0219525906000847

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S0219525906000847

Access Statistics for this article

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS) is currently edited by Frank Schweitzer

More articles in Advances in Complex Systems (ACS) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().