Publications (85)
Determinants of successful mitigation in coupled social-climate dynamics
Longmei Shu, Feng Fu
Understanding the impact of human behavior is crucial for successful mitigation of climate change across the globe. To shed light onto this issue, here we couple the forest dieback…
Evolutionary dynamics of group cooperation with asymmetrical environmental feedback
Yanxuan Shao, Xin Wang, Feng Fu
In recent years, there has been growing interest in studying evolutionary games with environmental feedback. Previous studies exclusively focus on two-player games. However, extens…
When minor issues matter: symmetries, pluralism, and polarization in similarity-based opinion dynamics
Brian Mintz, Daniel Simonson, Dominik Wodarz +2
Understanding how opinions evolve through social interactions is crucial for mitigating polarization. Existing opinion-dynamics models incorporate both attractive and repulsive int…
Nonlinear contagion dynamics on dynamical networks: exact solutions ranging from consensus times to evolutionary trajectories
Xunlong Wang, Feng Fu, Bin Wu
Understanding nonlinear social contagion dynamics on dynamical networks, such as opinion formation, is crucial for gaining new insights into consensus and polarization. Similar to…
The Other Side of the Coin: Recipient Norms and Their Impact on Indirect Reciprocity and Cooperation
Alina Glaubitz, Feng Fu
Human cooperation depends on indirect reciprocity. In this work, we explore the concept of indirect reciprocity using a donation game in an infinitely large population. In particul…
Predicting the outcomes of treatment to eradicate the latent reservoir for HIV-1
Alison L. Hill, Daniel I. S. Rosenbloom, Feng Fu +2
Massive research efforts are now underway to develop a cure for HIV infection, allowing patients to discontinue lifelong combination antiretroviral therapy (ART). New latency-rever…
Polarization, Abstention, and the Median Voter Theorem
Matthew I. Jones, Antonio D. Sirianni, Feng Fu
The median voter theorem has long been the default model of voter behavior and candidate choice. While contemporary work on the distribution of political opinion has emphasized pol…
Highly coordinated nationwide massive travel restrictions are central to effective mitigation and control of COVID-19 outbreaks in China
Xingru Chen, Feng Fu
The COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus 2019 (SARS-CoV-2), has caused graving woes across the globe since first reported in the epicenter Wuhan, Hubei, China, Dec…
Eco-evolutionary dynamics with environmental feedback: cooperation in a changing world
Xin Wang, Feng Fu
Eco-evolutionary game dynamics which characterizes the mutual interactions and the coupled evolutions of strategies and environments has been of growing interests in very recent ye…
Complex Systems of Secrecy: The Offshore Networks of Oligarchs
Ho-Chun Herbert Chang, Brooke Harrington, Feng Fu +1
Following the invasion of Ukraine, the US, UK, and EU governments--among others--sanctioned oligarchs close to Putin. This approach has come under scrutiny, as evidence has emerged…
The Geometry of Zero-Determinant Strategies
Xingru Chen, Long Wang, Feng Fu
The advent of Zero-Determinant (ZD) strategies has reshaped the study of reciprocity and cooperation in the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma games. The ramification of ZD strategies has…
The structure of self-organized blogosphere
Feng Fu, Lianghuan Liu, Kai Yang +1
In this paper, a statistical analysis of the structure of one blog community, a kind of social networks, is presented. The quantities such as degree distribution, clustering coeffi…
Strategy intervention for the evolution of fairness
Yanling Zhang, Feng Fu
Masses of experiments have shown individual preference for fairness which seems irrational. The reason behind it remains a focus for research. The effect of spite (individuals are…
Promotion of cooperation induced by the interplay between structure and game dynamics
Feng Fu, Xiaojie Chen, Lianghuan Liu +1
We consider the coupled dynamics of the adaption of network structure and the evolution of strategies played by individuals occupying the network vertices. We propose a computation…
Random Choices can Facilitate the Solving of Collective Network Coloring Problems by Artificial Agents
Matthew I. Jones, Scott D. Pauls, Feng Fu
Global coordination is required to solve a wide variety of challenging collective action problems from network colorings to the tragedy of the commons. Recent empirical study shows…
Reactive means in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma
Grant Molnar, Caroline Hammond, Feng Fu
The Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) is a well studied framework for understanding direct reciprocity and cooperation in pairwise encounters. However, measuring the morality of va…
Indirect reciprocity in the public goods game with collective reputations
Ming Wei, Xin Wang, Longzhao Liu +6
Indirect reciprocity unveils how social cooperation is founded upon moral systems. Within the frame of dyadic games based on individual reputations, the "leading-eight" strategies…
Evolutionary Kuramoto Dynamics
Elizabeth A. Tripp, Feng Fu, Scott D. Pauls
Common models of synchronizable oscillatory systems consist of a collection of coupled oscillators governed by a collection of differential equations. The ubiquitous Kuramoto model…
Evolutionary game dynamics with three strategies in finite populations
Jing Wang, Feng Fu, Long Wang +1
We propose a model for evolutionary game dynamics with three strategies , and in the framework of Moran process in finite populations. The model can be described as a st…
Identifying Bridges and Catalysts for Persistent Cooperation Using Network-Based Approach
Xingru Chen, Feng Fu
The framework of iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) is commonly used to study direct reciprocity and cooperation, with a focus on the assessment of the generosity and reciprocal fai…
Information propagation and collective consensus in blogosphere: a game-theoretical approach
Lianghuan Liu, Feng Fu, Long Wang
In this paper, we study the information propagation in an empirical blogging network by game-theoretical approach. The blogging network has small-world property and is scale-free.…
Reinforcement Learning Dynamics of Network Vaccination and Hysteresis: A Double-Edged Sword for Addressing Vaccine Hesitancy
Atticus McWhorter, Feng Fu
Mass vaccination remains a long-lasting challenge for disease control and prevention with upticks in vaccine hesitancy worldwide. Here, we introduce an experience-based learning (Q…
Determinants of successful disease control through voluntary quarantine dynamics on social networks
Simiao Shi, Zhiyuan Wang, Xingru Chen +1
In the wake of epidemics, quarantine measures are typically recommended by health authorities or governments to help control the spread of the disease. Compared with mandatory quar…
Risk-Aware Multi-Armed Bandit Problem with Application to Portfolio Selection
Xiaoguang Huo, Feng Fu
Sequential portfolio selection has attracted increasing interests in the machine learning and quantitative finance communities in recent years. As a mathematical framework for rein…
Steering control of payoff-maximizing players in adaptive learning dynamics
Xingru Chen, Feng Fu
Evolutionary game theory provides a mathematical foundation for cross-disciplinary fertilization, especially for integrating ideas from artificial intelligence and game theory. Suc…
Working with Large Language Models to Enhance Messaging Effectiveness for Vaccine Confidence
Lucinda Gullison, Feng Fu
Vaccine hesitancy and misinformation are significant barriers to achieving widespread vaccination coverage. Smaller public health departments may lack the expertise or resources to…
Evolutionary game dynamics with environmental feedback in a network with two communities
Katherine Betz, Feng Fu, Naoki Masuda
Recent developments of eco-evolutionary models have shown that evolving feedbacks between behavioral strategies and the environment of game interactions, leading to changes in the…
Mathematics of multi-agent learning systems at the interface of game theory and artificial intelligence
Long Wang, Feng Fu, Xingru Chen
Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are two fields that, at first glance, might seem distinct, but they have notable connections and intersections. The…
Reinforcement Learning Jazz Improvisation: When Music Meets Game Theory
Vedant Tapiavala, Joshua Piesner, Sourjyamoy Barman +1
Live performances of music are always charming, with the unpredictability of improvisation due to the dynamic between musicians and interactions with the audience. Jazz improvisati…
The satisficing secretary problem: when closed-form solutions meet simulated annealing
Roberto Brera, Feng Fu
The secretary problem has been a focus of extensive study with a variety of extensions that offer useful insights into the theory of optimal stopping. The original solution is to s…
Stereotyping by strategy standing diversifies cooperation patterns in indirect reciprocity
Ming Wei, Xin Wang, Wenqiang Zhu +4
Indirect reciprocity explains how cooperation evolves through social reputations. People observe others, assign reputations, and condition their future actions on these assignments…
Population heterogeneity in vaccine coverage impacts epidemic thresholds and bifurcation dynamics
Alina Glaubitz, Feng Fu
Population heterogeneity, especially in individuals' contact networks, plays an important role in transmission dynamics of infectious diseases. For vaccine-preventable diseases, ou…
Strategies of cooperation and defection in five large language models
Saptarshi Pal, Abhishek Mallela, Christian Hilbe +5
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed to support human decision-making. This use of LLMs has concerning implications, especially when their prescriptions affect th…
Spatial Games of Fake News
Matthew I Jones, Scott D. Pauls, Feng Fu
To curb the spread of fake news on social media platforms, recent studies have considered an online crowdsourcing fact-checking approach as one possible intervention method to redu…
The Niche Connectivity Paradox: Multichrome Contagions Overcome Vaccine Hesitancy more effectively than Monochromacy
Ho-Chun Herbert Chang, Feng Fu
The rise of vaccine hesitancy has caused a resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles and pertussis, alongside widespread skepticism and refusals of COVID-19 vaccin…
Elitism in Mathematics and Inequality
Ho-Chun Herbert Chang, Feng Fu
The Fields Medal, often referred as the Nobel Prize of mathematics, is awarded to no more than four mathematician under the age of 40, every four years. In recent years, its confer…
Co-Contagion Diffusion on Multilayer Networks
Ho-Chun Herbert Chang, Feng Fu
This study examines the interface of three elements during co-contagion diffusion: the \textbf{synergy} between contagions, the \textbf{dormancy} rate of each individual contagion,…
Opinion formation on dynamic networks: identifying conditions for the emergence of partisan echo chambers
Tucker Evans, Feng Fu
Modern political interaction is characterized by strong partisanship and a lack of interest in information sharing and agreement across party lines. It remains largely unclear how…
Indirect reciprocity beyond pairwise interactions
Ming Wei, Xin Wang, Junyu Lu +5
Cooperation in groups underpins collective responses to challenges from climate governance to public goods provision, yet how moral evaluation sustains it remains poorly understood…
Steering Eco-Evolutionary Games Dynamics with Manifold Control
Xin Wang, Zhiming Zheng, Feng Fu
Feedback loops between population dynamics of individuals and their ecological environment are ubiquitously found in nature, and have shown profound effects on the resulting eco-ev…
Overcoming vaccine hesitancy by multiplex social network targeting: An analysis of targeting algorithms and implications
Marzena Fügenschuh, Feng Fu
Incorporating social factors into disease prevention and control efforts is an important undertaking of behavioral epidemiology. The interplay between disease transmission and huma…
Spillover modes in multiplex games: double-edged effects on cooperation, and their coevolution
Tommy Khoo, Feng Fu, Scott Pauls
In recent years, there has been growing interest in studying games on multiplex networks that account for interactions across linked social contexts. However, little is known about…
Asymmetric Partisan Voter Turnout Games
Cameron Guage, Feng Fu
Since Downs proposed that the act of voting is irrational in 1957, myriad models have been proposed to explain voting and account for observed turnout patterns. We propose a model…
Social dilemmas in an online social network: the structure and evolution of cooperation
Feng Fu, Xiaojie Chen, Lianghuan Liu +1
We investigate two paradigms for studying the evolution of cooperation--Prisoner's Dilemma and Snowdrift game in an online friendship network obtained from a social networking site…
Coevolution of Cooperation and Partner Rewiring Range in Spatial Social Networks
Tommy Khoo, Feng Fu, Scott Pauls
In recent years, there has been growing interest in the study of coevolutionary games on networks. Despite much progress, little attention has been paid to spatially embedded netwo…
How norms shape the evolution of prosocial behavior. Compassion, Universalizability, Reciprocity, Equity: A C.U.R.E for social dilemmas
Brian Mintz, Feng Fu
How cooperation evolves and particularly maintains at a large scale remains an open problem for improving humanity across domains ranging from climate change to pandemic response.…
Modeling Duelling Contagions of True and False Information in the Face of Inherent Individual biases
Vaibhav Krishna, Hirokazu Shirado, Feng Fu +1
Advanced digital communication has revolutionized how people create and consume information, making information diffusion an important topic of research for domains from public hea…
Mathematically Modeling Spillover Dynamics of Emerging Zoonoses with Intermediate Hosts
Katherine P. Royce, Feng Fu
The World Health Organization describes zoonotic diseases as a major pandemic threat, and modeling the behavior of such diseases is a key component of their control. Many emerging…
Social learning of prescribing behavior can promote population optimum of antibiotic use
Xingru Chen, Feng Fu
The rise and spread of antibiotic resistance causes worsening medical cost and mortality especially for life-threatening bacteria infections, thereby posing a major threat to globa…
Influence of initial distributions on robust cooperation in evolutionary Prisoner's Dilemma
Xiaojie Chen, Feng Fu, Long Wang
We study the evolutionary Prisoner's Dilemma game on scale-free networks for different initial distributions. We consider three types of initial distributions for cooperators and d…
Dynamics of Multi-Agent Actor-Critic Learning in Stochastic Games: from Multistability and Chaos to Stable Cooperation
Yuxin Geng, Wolfram Barfuss, Feng Fu +1
Achieving robust coordination and cooperation is a central challenge in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Uncovering the mechanisms underlying such emergent behaviors call…
Public discourse and social network echo chambers driven by socio-cognitive biases
Xin Wang, Antonio D. Sirianni, Shaoting Tang +2
In recent years, social media has increasingly become an important platform for political campaigns, especially elections. It remains elusive how exactly public discourse is driven…
Evolutionary Kuramoto dynamics unravels origins of chimera states in neural populations
Thomas Zdyrski, Scott Pauls, Feng Fu
Neural synchronization is central to cognition However, incomplete synchronization often produces chimera states where coherent and incoherent dynamics coexist. While previous stud…
Social Learning and the Exploration-Exploitation Tradeoff
Brian Mintz, Feng Fu
Cultures around the world show varying levels of conservatism. While maintaining traditional ideas prevents wrong ones from being embraced, it also slows or prevents adaptation to…
Evolutionary game dynamics in inhomogeneous populations
Xiaojie Chen, Feng Fu, Long Wang +1
To our knowledge, the populations are generally assumed to be homogeneous in the traditional approach to evolutionary game dynamics. Here, we focus on the inhomogeneous populations…
Phenotype affinity mediated interactions can facilitate the evolution of cooperation
Te Wu, Feng Fu, Long Wang
We study the coevolutionary dynamics of the diversity of phenotype expression and the evolution of cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma game. Rather than pre-assigning zero-or-one…
Evolutionary Dynamics of Gig Economy Labor Strategies under Technology, Policy and Market Influence
Kevin Hu, Feng Fu
The emergence of the modern gig economy introduces a new set of employment considerations for firms and laborers that include various trade-offs. With a game-theoretical approach,…
Evolutionary games and spatial periodicity
Te Wu, Feng Fu, Long Wang
We establish a theoretical framework to address evolutionary dynamics of spatial games under strong selection. As the selection intensity tends to infinity, strategy competition un…
Social Imitation Dynamics of Vaccination Driven by Vaccine Effectiveness and Beliefs
Feng Fu, Ran Zhuo, Xingru Chen
Declines in vaccination coverage for vaccine-preventable diseases, such as measles and chickenpox, have enabled their surprising comebacks and pose significant public health challe…
Evolutionary Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning in Group Social Dilemmas
Brian Mintz, Feng Fu
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that has been successfully applied to a wide variety of problems. However, it can be unpredictable and produce…
Too little, too late -- a dynamical systems model for gun-related violence and intervention
Feng Fu, Daniel N. Rockmore
In the United States the laws regulating the carrying of firearms in public vary state-to-state. In a highly publicized event, the Governor of New Mexico recently issued an emergen…
Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics of Bimatrix Games
Longmei Shu, Feng Fu
Feedbacks between strategies and the environment are common in social-ecological, evolutionary-ecological, and even psychological-economic systems. Utilizing common resources is al…
Unbending strategies shepherd cooperation and suppress extortion in spatial populations
Zijie Chen, Yuxin Geng, Xingru Chen +1
Evolutionary game dynamics on networks typically consider the competition among simple strategies such as cooperation and defection in the Prisoner's Dilemma and summarize the effe…
Partner selections in public goods games with constant group size
Te Wu, Feng Fu, Long Wang
Most of previous studies concerning the Public Goods Game assume either participation is unconditional or the number of actual participants in a competitive group changes over time…
Sentiment-Based Prediction of Alternative Cryptocurrency Price Fluctuations Using Gradient Boosting Tree Model
Tianyu Ray Li, Anup S. Chamrajnagar, Xander R. Fong +2
In this paper, we analyze Twitter signals as a medium for user sentiment to predict the price fluctuations of a small-cap alternative cryptocurrency called \emph{ZClassic}. We extr…
Evolution of Cooperation in Public Goods Games with Stochastic Opting-Out
Alexander G. Ginsberg, Feng Fu
This paper investigates the evolution of strategic play where players drawn from a finite well-mixed population are offered the opportunity to play in a public goods game. All play…
Group Cooperation Diverges onto Durable Low versus High Paths: Public Goods Experiments in 134 Honduran Villages
Marios Papamichalis, Nicholas Christakis, Feng Fu
We performed large, lab-in-the-field experiment (2,591 participants across 134 Honduran villages; ten rounds) and tracked how contribution behavior unfolds in fixed, anonymous grou…
Oscillatory dynamics in the dilemma of social distancing
Alina Glaubitz, Feng Fu
Social distancing as one of the main non-pharmaceutical interventions can help slow down the spread of diseases, like in the COVID-19 pandemic. Effective social distancing, unless…
Immune checkpoint therapy modeling of PD-1/PD-L1 blockades reveals subtle difference in their response dynamics and potential synergy in combination
Kamran Kaveh, Feng Fu
Immune checkpoint therapy is one of the most promising immunotherapeutic methods that are likely able to give rise to durable treatment response for various cancer types. Despite m…
Evolution of cooperation in the multiplex
Zijie Chen, Xingru Chen, Feng Fu
Across biological and social systems, cooperation often depends on phenotypic cues rather than random encounters. To account for real-world interactions unfolding across multiple,…
Outlearning Extortioners by Fair-minded Unbending Strategies
Xingru Chen, Feng Fu
Recent theory shows that extortioners taking advantage of the zero-determinant (ZD) strategy can unilaterally claim an unfair share of the payoffs in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemm…
Risk management of solitary and eusocial reproduction
Feng Fu, Sarah D. Kocher, Martin A. Nowak
Social insect colonies can be seen as a distinct form of biological organization because they function as superorganisms. Understanding how natural selection acts on the emergence…
Understanding Gambling Behavior and Risk Attitudes Using Cryptocurrency-based Casino Blockchain Data
Jonathan Meng, Feng Fu
The statistical concept of Gambler's Ruin suggests that gambling has a large amount of risk. Nevertheless, gambling at casinos and gambling on the Internet are both hugely popular…
Information propagation in a novel hierarchical network
Feng Fu, Lianghuan Liu, Long Wang
A novel hierarchical model of complex network is proposed, and information propagation process taking place on top of the network is investigated. Our model is demonstrated to have…
Prisoner's Dilemma on community networks
Xiaojie Chen, Feng Fu, Long Wang
We introduce a community network model which exhibits scale-free property and study the evolutionary Prisoner's Dilemma game (PDG) on this network model. It is found that the frequ…
Homophily and wealth inequality shape mitigation behavior in coupled social-climate models
Luke Wisniewski, Thomas Zdyrski, Feng Fu
Understanding the role of human behavior in shaping environmental outcomes is crucial for addressing global challenges such as climate change. Environmental systems are influenced…
Spatial heterogeneity in drug concentrations can facilitate the emergence of resistance to cancer therapy
Feng Fu, Martin A. Nowak, Sebastian Bonhoeffer
Acquired resistance is one of the major barriers to successful cancer therapy. The development of resistance is commonly attributed to genetic heterogeneity. However, heterogeneity…
The dual problems of coordination and anti-coordination on random bipartite graphs
Matthew I. Jones, Scott D. Pauls, Feng Fu
In some scenarios ("anti-coordination games"), individuals are better off choosing different actions than their neighbors while in other scenarios ("coordination games"), it is ben…
Evolutionary branching and consistency in human cooperation: the interplay of incentives and volunteerism in addressing collective action dilemmas
Alina Glaubitz, Feng Fu
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 benefit…
Social Dilemma of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions
Alina Glaubitz, Feng Fu
In fighting infectious diseases posing a global health threat, ranging from influenza to Zika, non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI), such as social distancing and face covering,…
Evolutionary Game Dynamics in Populations with Heterogeneous Structures
Wes Maciejewski, Feng Fu, Christoph Hauert
Evolutionary graph theory is a well established framework for modelling the evolution of social behaviours in structured populations. An emerging consensus in this field is that gr…
Evolutionary dynamics of pairwise and group cooperation in heterogeneous social networks
Dini Wang, Peng Yi, Gang Yan +1
Understanding how cooperation evolves in structured populations remains a fundamental question across diverse disciplines. The problem of cooperation typically involves pairwise or…
The Point of No Return: Evolution of Excess Mutation Rate is Possible Even for Simple Mutation Models
Brian Mintz, Feng Fu
Under constant selection, each trait has a fixed fitness, and small mutation rates allow populations to efficiently exploit the optimal trait. Therefore it is reasonable to expect…
Co-Diffusion of Social Contagions
Ho-Chun Herbert Chang, Feng Fu
Prior social contagion models consider the spread of either one contagion at a time on interdependent networks or multiple contagions on single layer networks or under assumptions…
Evolutionary Prisoner's Dilemma on heterogeneous Newman-Watts small-world network
Feng Fu, Lianghuan Liu, Long Wang
We focus on the heterogeneity of social networks and its role to the emergence of prevailing cooperation and sustaining cooperators. The social networks are representative of the i…