Evolutionary consequences of behavioral diversity
Alexander J. Stewart, Todd L. Parsons, Joshua B. Plotkin

TL;DR
This paper investigates how increased behavioral diversity in iterated social games influences evolutionary dynamics, revealing complex effects on cooperation stability, fitness landscapes, and strategy invasibility in finite populations.
Contribution
It demonstrates that greater behavioral choices can both promote and hinder cooperation, and that multi-choice strategies tend to invade populations, expanding understanding beyond binary strategies.
Findings
Some two-choice strategies resist invasion by multi-choice strategies.
Greater behavioral diversity creates rugged fitness landscapes with multiple stable cooperation levels.
Multi-choice strategies can invade and resist invasion, promoting behavioral diversity.
Abstract
Iterated games provide a framework to describe social interactions among groups of individuals. Recent work stimulated by the discovery of "zero-determinant" strategies has rapidly expanded our ability to analyze such interactions. This body of work has primarily focused on games in which players face a simple binary choice, to "cooperate" or "defect". Real individuals, however, often exhibit behavioral diversity, varying their input to a social interaction both qualitatively and quantitatively. Here we explore how access to a greater diversity of behavioral choices impacts the evolution of social dynamics in finite populations. We show that, in public goods games, some two-choice strategies can nonetheless resist invasion by all possible multi-choice invaders, even while engaging in relatively little punishment. We also show that access to greater behavioral choice results in more…
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Taxonomy
TopicsEvolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies · Evolution and Genetic Dynamics
