Population dynamics and games of variable size
Matheus Hansen, Fabio A. C. C. Chalub

TL;DR
This paper introduces Variable Size Game Theory (VSGT), where players decide game size strategically, and explores its implications for cooperation, speciation, and epidemic modeling, demonstrating its potential to explain complex biological and social phenomena.
Contribution
The paper develops VSGT, a novel framework allowing players to choose game size, and applies it to diverse scenarios including cooperation, speciation, and epidemic dynamics.
Findings
Large groups can dominate costly tasks, supporting eusociality evolution.
Different strategies lead to spontaneous population segregation, modeling sympatric speciation.
VSGT can recast epidemic models like SIRS into a game-theoretic framework.
Abstract
This work introduces the concept of Variable Size Game Theory (VSGT), in which the number of players in a game is a strategic decision made by the players themselves. We start by discussing the main examples in game theory: dominance, coexistence, and coordination. We show that the same set of pay-offs can result in coordination-like or coexistence-like games depending on the strategic decision of each player type. We also solve an inverse problem to find a -player game that reproduces the same fixation pattern of the VSGT. In the sequel, we consider a game involving prosocial and antisocial players, i.e., individuals who tend to play with large groups and small groups, respectively. In this game, a certain task should be performed, that will benefit one of the participants at the expense of the other players. We show that individuals able to gather large groups to perform the task…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
MethodsSparse Evolutionary Training
