Demographic noise slows down cycles of dominance

TL;DR

This paper investigates how demographic noise affects cyclic dominance in the Rock--Paper--Scissors model, revealing that stochastic effects slow down the cycle period compared to deterministic predictions, especially at low mutation rates.

Contribution

It develops a theory explaining the impact of demographic noise on cycle periods and introduces a stochastic differential equation model for transition regimes.

Findings

Demographic noise significantly delays the cycle period at low mutation rates.

The cycle period scales inversely with mutation rate in stochastic models.

A new intermediate regime is characterized by a stochastic differential equation model.

Abstract

We study the phenomenon of cyclic dominance in the paradigmatic Rock--Paper--Scissors model, as occurring in both stochastic individual-based models of finite populations and in the deterministic replicator equations. The mean-field replicator equations are valid in the limit of large populations and, in the presence of mutation and unbalanced payoffs, they exhibit an attracting limit cycle. The period of this cycle depends on the rate of mutation; specifically, the period grows logarithmically as the mutation rate tends to zero. We find that this behaviour is not reproduced in stochastic simulations with a fixed finite population size. Instead, demographic noise present in the individual-based model dramatically slows down the progress of the limit cycle, with the typical period growing as the reciprocal of the mutation rate. Here we develop a theory that explains these scaling regimes and delineates them in terms of population size and mutation rate. We identify a further intermediate regime in which we construct a stochastic differential equation model describing the transition between stochastically-dominated and mean-field behaviour.