Reentrant phase transitions and defensive alliances in social dilemmas with informed strategies

Abstract

Knowing the strategy of an opponent in a competitive environment conveys obvious evolutionary advantages. But this information is costly, and the benefit of being informed may not necessarily offset the additional cost. Here we introduce social dilemmas with informed strategies, and we show that this gives rise to two cyclically dominant triplets that form defensive alliances. The stability of these two alliances is determined by the rotation velocity of the strategies within each triplet. A weaker strategy in a faster rotating triplet can thus overcome an individually stronger competitor. Fascinating spatial patterns favor the dominance of a single defensive alliance, but enable also the stable coexistence of both defensive alliances in very narrow regions of the parameter space. A continuous reentrant phase transition reveals before unseen complexity behind the stability of strategic alliances in evolutionary social dilemmas.

6 two-column pages, 5 figures; accepted for publication in Europhysics Letters

References in corpus (6)

• Evolutionary games on graphs
• Dynamical Organization of Cooperation in Complex Topologies
• Cyclic dominance in evolutionary games: A review
• Biased imitation in coupled evolutionary games in interdependent networks
• Benevolent characteristics promote cooperative behaviour among humans
• How turbulence regulates biodiversity in systems with cyclic competition

Cited by in corpus (17)

• Statistical physics of human cooperation
• The self-organizing impact of averaged payoffs on the evolution of cooperation
• Strategy dependent learning activity in cyclic dominant systems
• Cooperation and competition between pair and multi-player social games in spatial populations
• The effect of habitats and fitness on species coexistence in systems with cyclic dominance
• Dynamically generated hierarchies in games of competition
• Competition of alliances in a cyclically dominant eight-species population
• Invasion controlled pattern formation in a generalized multi-species predator-prey system
• Risk and interaction aversion: screening mechanisms in the Prisoner's Dilemma game
• Emerging solutions from the battle of defensive alliances
• Equal partners do better in defensive alliances
• When faster rotation is harmful: the competition of alliances with inner blocking mechanism
• Oppressed species can form a winning pair in a multi-species ecosystem
• Competition among alliances of different sizes
• The Evolution of Altruistic Rationality Provides a Solution to Social Dilemmas via Rational Reciprocity
• Suppressing defection by increasing temptation: the impact of smart cooperators on a social dilemma situation
• Monitoring biodiversity on highly reactive rock-paper-scissors models