Game-environment feedback dynamics for voluntary prisoner's dilemma games

TL;DR

This paper extends eco-evolutionary game theory to multi-strategy settings, analyzing feedback dynamics in voluntary prisoner's dilemma games and identifying conditions for various equilibrium states, including coexistence and oscillations.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-strategy eco-evolutionary framework for voluntary prisoner's dilemma games and characterizes the stability of diverse equilibrium states based on feedback and payoff structures.

Findings

Existence of multiple equilibrium states including coexistence and oscillations.

Conditions for stability depend on feedback strength and payoff matrix.

Three-strategy coexistence offers a new mechanism for biodiversity maintenance.

Abstract

Recently, the eco-evolutionary game theory which describes the coupled dynamics of strategies and environment have attracted great attention. At the same time, most of the current work is focused on the classic two-player two-strategy game. In this work, we study multi-strategy eco-evolutionary game theory which is an extension of the framework. For simplicity, we'll focus on the voluntary participation Prisoner's dilemma game. For the general class of payoff-dependent feedback dynamics, we show the conditions for the existence and stability of internal equilibrium by using the replicator dynamics, respectively. Where internal equilibrium points, such as, two-strategy coexistence states, three-strategy coexistence states, persistent oscillation states and interior saddle points. These states are determined by the relative feedback strength and payoff matrix, and are independent of the relative feedback speed and initial state. In particular, the three-strategy coexistence provides a new mechanism for maintaining biodiversity in biology, ecology, and sociology. Besides, we find that this three-strategy model return to the persistent oscillation state of the two-strategy model when there is no defective strategy at the initial moment.