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Related Experiment Video

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Peering into the Dynamics of Social Interactions: Measuring Play Fighting in Rats

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Published on: January 18, 2013

Assortativity evolving from social dilemmas.

Heinrich H Nax¹, Alexandros Rigos²

¹Department of Social Sciences, ETH Zürich, Clausiusstrasse 37-C3, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland.

Journal of Theoretical Biology

|February 9, 2016

Summary

Evolutionary game theory shows that endogenizing matching mechanisms leads to stable assortativity. This helps overcome the tragedy of the commons by promoting cooperation in social dilemmas.

Keywords:

(co-)evolution Assortativity Cooperation Democratic consensus

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Area of Science:

Evolutionary Game Theory
Behavioral Economics
Social Dilemmas

Background:

Tragedies of the commons arise from social dilemmas where individual self-interest conflicts with collective well-being.
Assortative mechanisms, such as kin selection and reciprocity, are known to mitigate these dilemmas.
Existing models often assume fixed external matching processes, overlooking the co-evolution of matching and cooperation.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how assortativity and cooperation co-evolve when the matching process is endogenized.
To determine the evolutionary stability of different assortativity levels under varying social dilemma structures.
To quantify the reduction in social loss achieved by endogenous assortativity.

Main Methods:

Developed an evolutionary game theory model where individuals can influence their matching partners.
Analyzed the dynamics of assortativity and cooperation through simulation and analytical methods.
Examined a general class of social dilemma games to assess the robustness of findings.

Main Results:

Endogenized matching processes frequently lead to stable states of either full or null assortativity.
The evolutionary stability of assortativity is largely independent of the relative speeds of assortativity and cooperation evolution.
The specific incentive structure of the social dilemma critically influences the outcomes and the degree of cooperation.

Conclusions:

Endogenizing the matching process provides a robust mechanism for overcoming tragedies of the commons.
Full-or-null assortativities represent evolutionarily stable strategies in many social dilemma scenarios.
The study quantifies the potential for endogenous mechanisms to resolve collective action problems.