Game Theoretical Interactions of Moving Agents

TL;DR

This paper introduces a model combining game theory with agent movement, revealing how success-driven motion influences cooperation and social dynamics, leading to self-organized patterns that mirror real-world social behaviors.

Contribution

It presents a novel integration of spatial movement with game theoretical interactions, exploring its effects on cooperation and social pattern formation.

Findings

Movement allows agents to evade defectors and seek cooperators.

Spatial dynamics lead to emergent self-organized social patterns.

The model explains various observed social behaviors.

Abstract

Game theory has been one of the most successful quantitative concepts to describe social interactions, their strategical aspects, and outcomes. Among the payoff matrix quantifying the result of a social interaction, the interaction conditions have been varied, such as the number of repeated interactions, the number of interaction partners, the possibility to punish defective behavior etc. While an extension to spatial interactions has been considered early on such as in the "game of life", recent studies have focussed on effects of the structure of social interaction networks. However, the possibility of individuals to move and, thereby, evade areas with a high level of defection, and to seek areas with a high level of cooperation, has not been fully explored so far. This contribution presents a model combining game theoretical interactions with success-driven motion in space, and studies the consequences that this may have for the degree of cooperation and the spatio-temporal dynamics in the population. It is demonstrated that the combination of game theoretical interactions with motion gives rise to many self-organized behavioral patterns on an aggregate level, which can explain a variety of empirically observed social behaviors.