66,992 research outputs found
A Hierarchical Game with Strategy Evolution for Mobile Sponsored Content and Service Markets
In sponsored content and service markets, the content and service providers
are able to subsidize their target mobile users through directly paying the
mobile network operator, to lower the price of the data/service access charged
by the network operator to the mobile users. The sponsoring mechanism leads to
a surge in mobile data and service demand, which in return compensates for the
sponsoring cost and benefits the content/service providers. In this paper, we
study the interactions among the three parties in the market, namely, the
mobile users, the content/service providers and the network operator, as a
two-level game with multiple Stackelberg (i.e., leader) players. Our study is
featured by the consideration of global network effects owning to consumers'
grouping. Since the mobile users may have bounded rationality, we model the
service-selection process among them as an evolutionary-population follower
sub-game. Meanwhile, we model the pricing-then-sponsoring process between the
content/service providers and the network operator as a non-cooperative
equilibrium searching problem. By investigating the structure of the proposed
game, we reveal a few important properties regarding the equilibrium existence,
and propose a distributed, projection-based algorithm for iterative equilibrium
searching. Simulation results validate the convergence of the proposed
algorithm, and demonstrate how sponsoring helps improve both the providers'
profits and the users' experience
Ageing as a price of cooperation and complexity: Self-organization of complex systems causes the ageing of constituent networks
The analysis of network topology and dynamics is increasingly used for the description of the structure, function and evolution of complex systems. Here we summarize key aspects of the evolvability and robustness of the hierarchical network-set of macromolecules, cells, organisms, and ecosystems. Listing the costs and benefits of cooperation as a necessary behaviour to build this network hierarchy, we outline the major hypothesis of the paper: the emergence of hierarchical complexity needs cooperation leading to the ageing of the constituent networks. Local cooperation in a stable environment may lead to over-optimization developing an ‘always-old’ network, which ages slowly, and dies in an apoptosis-like process. Global cooperation by exploring a rapidly changing environment may cause an occasional over-perturbation exhausting system-resources, causing rapid degradation, ageing and death of an otherwise ‘forever-young’ network in a necrosis-like process. Giving a number of examples we explain how local and global cooperation can both evoke and help successful ageing. Finally, we show how various forms of cooperation and consequent ageing emerge as key elements in all major steps of evolution from the formation of protocells to the establishment of the globalized, modern human society. Thus, ageing emerges as a price of complexity, which is going hand-in-hand with cooperation enhancing each other in a successful community
Doves and hawks in economics revisited. An evolutionary quantum game theory-based analysis of financial crises
The last financial and economic crisis demonstrated the dysfunctional
long-term effects of aggressive behaviour in financial markets. Yet,
evolutionary game theory predicts that under the condition of strategic
dependence a certain degree of aggressive behaviour remains within a given
population of agents. However, as the consequences of the financial crisis
exhibit, it would be desirable to change the 'rules of the game' in a way that
prevents the occurrence of any aggressive behaviour and thereby also the danger
of market crashes. The paper picks up this aspect. Through the extension of the
in literature well-known Hawk-Dove game by a quantum approach, we can show that
dependent on entanglement, also evolutionary stable strategies can emerge,
which are not predicted by classical evolutionary game theory and where the
total economic population uses a non aggressive quantum strategy
Growth dynamics and the evolution of cooperation in microbial populations
Microbes providing public goods are widespread in nature despite running the
risk of being exploited by free-riders. However, the precise ecological factors
supporting cooperation are still puzzling. Following recent experiments, we
consider the role of population growth and the repetitive fragmentation of
populations into new colonies mimicking simple microbial life-cycles.
Individual-based modeling reveals that demographic fluctuations, which lead to
a large variance in the composition of colonies, promote cooperation. Biased by
population dynamics these fluctuations result in two qualitatively distinct
regimes of robust cooperation under repetitive fragmentation into groups.
First, if the level of cooperation exceeds a threshold, cooperators will take
over the whole population. Second, cooperators can also emerge from a single
mutant leading to a robust coexistence between cooperators and free-riders. We
find frequency and size of population bottlenecks, and growth dynamics to be
the major ecological factors determining the regimes and thereby the
evolutionary pathway towards cooperation.Comment: 26 pages, 6 figure
Genome-driven evolutionary game theory helps understand the rise of metabolic interdependencies in microbial communities
Metabolite exchanges in microbial communities give rise to ecological interactions that govern ecosystem diversity and stability. It is unclear, however, how the rise of these interactions varies across metabolites and organisms. Here we address this question by integrating genome-scale models of metabolism with evolutionary game theory. Specifically, we use microbial fitness values estimated by metabolic models to infer evolutionarily stable interactions in multi-species microbial “games”. We first validate our approach using a well-characterized yeast cheater-cooperator system. We next perform over 80,000 in silico experiments to infer how metabolic interdependencies mediated by amino acid leakage in Escherichia coli vary across 189 amino acid pairs. While most pairs display shared patterns of inter-species interactions, multiple deviations are caused by pleiotropy and epistasis in metabolism. Furthermore, simulated invasion experiments reveal possible paths to obligate cross-feeding. Our study provides genomically driven insight into the rise of ecological interactions, with implications for microbiome research and synthetic ecology.We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Purchase Request No. HR0011515303, Contract No. HR0011-15-C-0091), the U.S. Department of Energy (Grants DE-SC0004962 and DE-SC0012627), the NIH (Grants 5R01DE024468 and R01GM121950), the national Science Foundation (Grants 1457695 and NSFOCE-BSF 1635070), MURI Grant W911NF-12-1-0390, the Human Frontiers Science Program (grant RGP0020/2016), and the Boston University Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research Office ARC grant on Systems Biology Approaches to Microbiome Research. We also thank Dr Kirill Korolev and members of the Segre Lab for their invaluable feedback on this work. (HR0011515303 - Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; HR0011-15-C-0091 - Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; DE-SC0004962 - U.S. Department of Energy; DE-SC0012627 - U.S. Department of Energy; 5R01DE024468 - NIH; R01GM121950 - NIH; 1457695 - national Science Foundation; NSFOCE-BSF 1635070 - national Science Foundation; W911NF-12-1-0390 - MURI; RGP0020/2016 - Human Frontiers Science Program; Boston University Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research Office ARC)Published versio
The modern versus extended evolutionary synthesis : sketch of an intra-genomic gene's eye view for the evolutionary-genetic underpinning of epigenetic and developmental evolution
Studying the phenotypic evolution of organisms in terms of populations of genes and genotypes,
the Modern Synthesis (MS) conceptualizes biological evolution in terms of 'inter-organismal'
interactions among genes sitting in the different individual organisms that constitute a population.
It 'black-boxes' the complex 'intra-organismic' molecular and developmental epigenetics mediating
between genotypes and phenotypes. To conceptually integrate epigenetics and evo-devo into
evolutionary theory, advocates of an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) argue that the MS's
reductive gene-centrism should be abandoned in favor of a more inclusive organism-centered approach.
To push the debate to a new level of understanding, we introduce the evolutionary biology
of 'intra-genomic conflict' (IGC) to the controversy. This strategy is based on a twofold rationale.
First, the field of IGC is both ‘gene-centered’ and 'intra-organismic' and, as such, could build a
bridge between the gene-centered MS and the intra-organismic fields of epigenetics and evo-devo.
And second, it is increasingly revealed that IGC plays a significant causal role in epigenetic and
developmental evolution and even in speciation. Hence, to deal with the ‘discrepancy’ between
the ‘gene-centered’ MS and the ‘intra-organismic’ fields of epigenetics and evo-devo, we sketch
a conceptual solution in terms of ‘intra-genomic conflict and compromise’ – an ‘intra-genomic
gene’s eye view’ that thinks in terms of intra-genomic ‘evolutionarily stable strategies’ (ESSs)
among numerous and various DNA regions and elements – to evolutionary-genetically underwrite
both epigenetic and developmental evolution, as such questioning the ‘gene-de-centered’
stance put forward by EES-advocates
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