7,969 research outputs found
The Evolution of Extortion in Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Games
Iterated games are a fundamental component of economic and evolutionary game
theory. They describe situations where two players interact repeatedly and have
the possibility to use conditional strategies that depend on the outcome of
previous interactions. In the context of evolution of cooperation, repeated
games represent the mechanism of reciprocation. Recently a new class of
strategies has been proposed, so called 'zero determinant strategies'. These
strategies enforce a fixed linear relationship between one's own payoff and
that of the other player. A subset of those strategies are 'extortioners' which
ensure that any increase in the own payoff exceeds that of the other player by
a fixed percentage. Here we analyze the evolutionary performance of this new
class of strategies. We show that in reasonably large populations they can act
as catalysts for the evolution of cooperation, similar to tit-for-tat, but they
are not the stable outcome of natural selection. In very small populations,
however, relative payoff differences between two players in a contest matter,
and extortioners hold their ground. Extortion strategies do particularly well
in co-evolutionary arms races between two distinct populations: significantly,
they benefit the population which evolves at the slower rate - an instance of
the so-called Red King effect. This may affect the evolution of interactions
between host species and their endosymbionts.Comment: contains 4 figure
Strong Amplifiers of Natural Selection: Proofs
We consider the modified Moran process on graphs to study the spread of
genetic and cultural mutations on structured populations. An initial mutant
arises either spontaneously (aka \emph{uniform initialization}), or during
reproduction (aka \emph{temperature initialization}) in a population of
individuals, and has a fixed fitness advantage over the residents of the
population. The fixation probability is the probability that the mutant takes
over the entire population. Graphs that ensure fixation probability of~1 in the
limit of infinite populations are called \emph{strong amplifiers}. Previously,
only a few examples of strong amplifiers were known for uniform initialization,
whereas no strong amplifiers were known for temperature initialization.
In this work, we study necessary and sufficient conditions for strong
amplification, and prove negative and positive results. We show that for
temperature initialization, graphs that are unweighted and/or self-loop-free
have fixation probability upper-bounded by , where is a
function linear in . Similarly, we show that for uniform initialization,
bounded-degree graphs that are unweighted and/or self-loop-free have fixation
probability upper-bounded by , where is the degree bound and
a function linear in . Our main positive result complements these
negative results, and is as follows: every family of undirected graphs with
(i)~self loops and (ii)~diameter bounded by , for some fixed
, can be assigned weights that makes it a strong amplifier, both
for uniform and temperature initialization
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