Biomedical subjects

Christoph Hauert

Publications and source records attributed to Christoph Hauert.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2002

Evolutionary prisoner's dilemma games with voluntary participation.

Voluntary participation in public good games has recently been demonstrated to be a simple yet effective mechanism to avoid deadlocks in states of mutual defection and to promote persistent cooperative behavior. Apart from cooperators and defectors a third strategical type is considered: the risk averse loners who are unwilling to participate in the social enterprise and rather rely on small but fixed earnings. This results in a rock-scissors-paper type of cyclic dominance of the three strategies. In the prisoner's dilemma, the effects of voluntary participation crucially depend on the underlying population structure. While leading to homogeneous states of all loners in well-mixed populations, we demonstrate that cyclic dominance produces self-organizing patterns on square lattices but leads to different types of oscillatory behavior on random regular graphs: the temptation to defect determines whether damped, periodic, or increasing oscillations occur. These Monte Carlo simulations are complemented by predictions from pair approximation reproducing the results for random regular graphs particularly well.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2002

Simple adaptive strategy wins the prisoner's dilemma.

The prisoner's dilemma has become the leading paradigm to explain the evolution of cooperation among selfish individuals. Here, we present an adaptive strategy that implements new mechanisms to process information about past encounters. The history of moves is summarized in an internal state which then determines the subsequent move. This enables the strategy to adjust its decisions to the character of the current opponent and to adapt the most promising strategic behavior. For this reason, we call such strategies Adaptor. Through evolutionary simulations, we demonstrate that the concept of Adaptor leads to strategic patterns that are (a) highly cooperative when playing against kin, (b) stable in a sense that goes far beyond the concept of evolutionary stability, (c) robust to environmental changes, i.e. variations of the parameter values and finally (d) superior in performance to the most prominent strategies in the literature.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

PubMed2002

Replicator dynamics for optional public good games.

The public goods game represents a straightforward generalization of the prisoner's dilemma to an arbitrary number of players. Since the dominant strategy is to defect, both classical and evolutionary game theory predict the asocial outcome that no player contributes to the public goods. In contrast to the compulsory public goods game, optional participation provides a natural way to avoid deadlocks in the state of mutual defection. The three resulting strategies--collaboration or defection in the public goods game, as well as not joining at all--are studied by means of a replicator dynamics, which can be completely analysed in spite of the fact that the payoff terms are nonlinear. If cooperation is valuable enough, the dynamics exhibits a rock-scissors-paper type of cycling between the three strategies, leading to sizeable average levels of cooperation in the population. Thus, voluntary participation makes cooperation feasible. But for each strategy, the average payoff value remains equal to the earnings of those not participating in the public goods game.

Altruism↗

PubMed2002

Phase transitions and volunteering in spatial public goods games.

We present a simple yet effective mechanism promoting cooperation under full anonymity by allowing for voluntary participation in public goods games. This natural extension leads to "rock-scissors-paper"-type cyclic dominance of the three strategies, cooperate, defect, and loner. In spatial settings with players arranged on a regular lattice, this results in interesting dynamical properties and intriguing spatiotemporal patterns. In particular, variations of the value of the public good leads to transitions between one-, two-, and three-strategy states which either are in the class of directed percolation or show interesting analogies to Ising-type models. Although volunteering is incapable of stabilizing cooperation, it efficiently prevents successful spreading of selfish behavior.

Economics↗

PubMed2002

Volunteering as Red Queen mechanism for cooperation in public goods games.

The evolution of cooperation among nonrelated individuals is one of the fundamental problems in biology and social sciences. Reciprocal altruism fails to provide a solution if interactions are not repeated often enough or groups are too large. Punishment and reward can be very effective but require that defectors can be traced and identified. Here we present a simple but effective mechanism operating under full anonymity. Optional participation can foil exploiters and overcome the social dilemma. In voluntary public goods interactions, cooperators and defectors will coexist. We show that this result holds under very diverse assumptions on population structure and adaptation mechanisms, leading usually not to an equilibrium but to an unending cycle of adjustments (a Red Queen type of evolution). Thus, voluntary participation offers an escape hatch out of some social traps. Cooperation can subsist in sizable groups even if interactions are not repeated, defectors remain anonymous, players have no memory, and assortment is purely random.

Cooperative Behavior↗

PubMed2002

Primer: altruism.

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Altruism↗