Chaitanya S. Gokhale and Arne Traulsen1
-Author Affiliations
Emmy-Noether Group for Evolutionary Dynamics, Department of Evolutionary Ecology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, 24306 Plön, Germany
Edited by Simon A. Levin, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved February 12, 2010 (received for review October 25, 2009)
Abstract
Evolutionary game dynamics of two players with two strategies has been studied in great detail. These games have been used to model many biologically relevant scenarios, ranging from social dilemmas in mammals to microbial diversity. Some of these games may, in fact, take place between a number of individuals and not just between two. Here we address one-shot games with multiple players. As long as we have only two strategies, many results from two-player games can be generalized to multiple players. For games with multiple players and more than two strategies, we show that statements derived for pairwise interactions no longer hold. For two-player games with any number of strategies there can be at most one isolated internal equilibrium. For any number of players d with any number of strategies n, there can be at most(d−1)n−1 isolated internal equilibria. Multiplayer games show a great dynamical complexity that cannot be captured based on pairwise interactions. Our results hold for any game and can easily be applied to specific cases, such as public goods games or multiplayer stag hunts.
Edited by Simon A. Levin, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved February 12, 2010 (received for review October 25, 2009)
Abstract
Evolutionary game dynamics of two players with two strategies has been studied in great detail. These games have been used to model many biologically relevant scenarios, ranging from social dilemmas in mammals to microbial diversity. Some of these games may, in fact, take place between a number of individuals and not just between two. Here we address one-shot games with multiple players. As long as we have only two strategies, many results from two-player games can be generalized to multiple players. For games with multiple players and more than two strategies, we show that statements derived for pairwise interactions no longer hold. For two-player games with any number of strategies there can be at most one isolated internal equilibrium. For any number of players d with any number of strategies n, there can be at most(d−1)n−1 isolated internal equilibria. Multiplayer games show a great dynamical complexity that cannot be captured based on pairwise interactions. Our results hold for any game and can easily be applied to specific cases, such as public goods games or multiplayer stag hunts.
evolutionary dynamics multiplayer games multiple strategies replicator dynamics finite populations
Footnotes
1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail:traulsen@evolbio.mpg.de.
Author contributions: C.S.G. and A.T. designed research, performed research, analyzed data, and wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0912214107/DCSupplemental.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0912214107/DCSupplemental.
+++++
PDF gratuito deste artigo aqui.
