Cooperation under pressure: a phase diagram for altruism

  • IFISC Seminar

  • Konstantin Klemm
  • Bioinformatics University of Leipzig, Germany
  • Sept. 9, 2008, 3 p.m.
  • Sala Multiusos, Ed. Cientifíco-Técnico
  • Announcement file

Cooperation and altruistic behavior are enhanced in spatially structured
populations as compared with mean-field scenarios [Nowak and May, 1992].
In most studies of evolutionary game theory with spatial structure,
however, the size of the population is assumed to be constant. Here I
study a model where the population may vary in response to environmental
pressure p. I discuss two non-trivial effects. First, as increasing p
dilutes the population, cooperation becomes dominant and prevents
extinction for any non-zero efficiency of altruistic acts. Second, in a
large region of the parameter space, the increase of cooperators
overcompensates the decrease of defectors with growing p. Thus the overall
population size rises in response to increasing environmental pressure. I
obtain the phase diagram displaying these effects by stochastic
simulations and confirm it by solving the equations of pair approximation.


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Damià Gomila

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