Altruism in groups: an evolutionary games approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new concept in evolutionary game theory to better model group altruism, showing how shared group utility can significantly alter equilibrium outcomes in biological and network scenarios.

Contribution

It proposes a novel extension to evolutionary games that accounts for shared group utility, addressing limitations of traditional models in representing altruistic behavior.

Findings

Shared group utility can change equilibrium structures dramatically.

Altruism impacts performance in wireless network access control.

The new model aligns better with biological and social behaviors.

Abstract

We revisit in this paper the relation between evolution of species and the mathematical tool of evolutionary games, which has been used to model and predict it. We indicate known shortcoming of this model that restricts the capacity of evolutionary games to model groups of individuals that share a common gene or a common fitness function. In this paper we provide a new concept to remedy this shortcoming in the standard evolutionary games in order to cover this kind of behavior. Further, we explore the relationship between this new concept and Nash equilibrium or ESS. We indicate through the study of some example in the biology as Hawk and Dove game, Stag Hunt Game and Prisoner Dilemma, that when taking into account a utility that is common to a group of individuals, the equilibrium structure may change dramatically. We also study the multiple access control in slotted Aloha based wireless networks. We analyze the impact of the altruism behavior on the performance at the equilibrium.