Fixation probabilities for the Moran process with three or more strategies: general and coupling results

Abstract

We study fixation probabilities for the Moran stochastic process for the evolution of a population with three or more types of individuals and frequency-dependent fitnesses. Contrarily to the case of populations with two types of individuals, in which fixation probabilities may be calculated by an exact formula, here we must solve a large system of linear equations. We first show that this system always has a unique solution. Other results are upper and lower bounds for the fixation probabilities obtained by coupling the Moran process with three strategies with birth-death processes with only two strategies. We also apply our bounds to the problem of evolution of cooperation in a population with three types of individuals already studied in a deterministic setting by Núñez Rodríguez and Neves (J. Math. Biol. (2016) 73:1665--1690). We argue that cooperators will be fixated in the population with probability arbitrarily close to 1 for a large region of initial conditions and large enough population sizes.

40 pages, 3 figures