Reentrant phase transitions and defensive alliances in social dilemmas with informed strategies

TL;DR

This paper explores how informed strategies in social dilemmas create cyclic alliances and reentrant phase transitions, revealing complex stability dynamics and coexistence conditions.

Contribution

It introduces informed strategies into social dilemmas, uncovering cyclically dominant alliances and reentrant phase transitions in evolutionary game dynamics.

Findings

Two cyclically dominant triplets form defensive alliances.

Weaker, faster strategies can overcome stronger, slower ones.

Stable coexistence of alliances occurs in narrow parameter regions.

Abstract

Knowing the strategy of an opponent in a competitive environment conveys obvious evolutionary advantages. But this information is costly, and the benefit of being informed may not necessarily offset the additional cost. Here we introduce social dilemmas with informed strategies, and we show that this gives rise to two cyclically dominant triplets that form defensive alliances. The stability of these two alliances is determined by the rotation velocity of the strategies within each triplet. A weaker strategy in a faster rotating triplet can thus overcome an individually stronger competitor. Fascinating spatial patterns favor the dominance of a single defensive alliance, but enable also the stable coexistence of both defensive alliances in very narrow regions of the parameter space. A continuous reentrant phase transition reveals before unseen complexity behind the stability of strategic alliances in evolutionary social dilemmas.