Evolutionary consequences of behavioral diversity

Abstract

Iterated games provide a framework to describe social interactions among groups of individuals. Recent work stimulated by the discovery of "zero-determinant" strategies has rapidly expanded our ability to analyze such interactions. This body of work has primarily focused on games in which players face a simple binary choice, to "cooperate" or "defect". Real individuals, however, often exhibit behavioral diversity, varying their input to a social interaction both qualitatively and quantitatively. Here we explore how access to a greater diversity of behavioral choices impacts the evolution of social dynamics in finite populations. We show that, in public goods games, some two-choice strategies can nonetheless resist invasion by all possible multi-choice invaders, even while engaging in relatively little punishment. We also show that access to greater behavioral choice results in more "rugged " fitness landscapes, with populations able to stabilize cooperation at multiple levels of investment, such that choice facilitates cooperation when returns on investments are low, but hinders cooperation when returns on investments are high. Finally, we analyze iterated rock-paper-scissors games, whose non-transitive payoff structure means unilateral control is difficult and zero-determinant strategies do not exist in general. Despite this, we find that a large portion of multi-choice strategies can invade and resist invasion by strategies that lack behavioral diversity -- so that even well-mixed populations will tend to evolve behavioral diversity.

26 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (14)

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• Evolutionary Dynamics of Group Formation
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• Mutation enhances cooperation in direct reciprocity
• Symbiotic behaviour in the Public Goods game with altruistic punishment
• Evolution of direct reciprocity in group-structured populations
• Conditions for the existence of zero-determinant strategies under observation errors in repeated games
• Single Equalizer Strategy with no Information Transfer for Conflict Escalation
• Criticality and Griffiths phases in random games with quenched disorder
• Adapting paths against zero-determinant strategies in repeated prisoner's dilemma games
• Birds of a Feather Flock Together: A Close Look at Cooperation Emergence via Multi-Agent RL
• Strategies that enforce linear payoff relationships under observation errors in Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma game
• Zero-Determinant strategies in repeated multiplayer social dilemmas with discounted payoffs
• Exerting Control in Repeated Social Dilemmas with Thresholds