Congestion phenomena caused by matching pennies in evolutionary games

TL;DR

This paper investigates how adding a matching-pennies game to evolutionary social dilemma games causes congestion phenomena that break symmetry and induce order-disorder transitions, with implications for community dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a microscopic mechanism linking matching-pennies interactions to congestion effects and symmetry breaking in spatial evolutionary games.

Findings

Matching-pennies induces probability current loops and symmetry breaking.

Congestion effects can eliminate phase transitions in the system.

Symmetry breaking can be beneficial for community stability.

Abstract

Evolutionary social dilemma games are extended by an additional matching-pennies game that modifies the collected payoffs. In a spatial version players are distributed on a square lattice and interact with their neighbors. Firstly, we show that the matching-pennies game can be considered as the microscopic force of the Red Queen effect that breaks the detailed balance and induces eddies in the microscopic probability currents if the strategy update is analogous to the Glauber dynamics for the kinetic Ising models. The resulting loops in probability current breaks symmetry between the chessboard-like arrangements of strategies via a bottleneck effect occurring along the four-edge loops in the microscopic states. The impact of this congestion is analogous to the application of a staggered magnetic field in the Ising model, that is, the order-disorder critical transition is wiped out by noise. It is illustrated that the congestion induced symmetry breaking can be beneficial for the whole community within a certain region of parameters.