Criticality and Griffiths phases in random games with quenched disorder

The perceived risk and reward for a given situation can vary depending on resource availability, accumulated wealth, and other extrinsic factors such as individual backgrounds. Based on this general aspect of everyday life, here we use evolutionary game theory to model a scenario with randomly perturbed payoffs in a prisoner's dilemma game. The perception diversity is modeled by adding a zero-average random noise in the payoff entries and a Monte Carlo simulation is used to obtain the population dynamics. This payoff heterogeneity can promote and maintain cooperation in a competitive scenario where only defectors would survive otherwise. In this work, we give a step further, understanding the role of heterogeneity by investigating the effects of quenched disorder in the critical properties of random games. We observe that payoff fluctuations induce a very slow dynamic, making the cooperation decay behave as power laws with varying exponents, instead of the usual exponential decay after the critical point, showing the emergence of a Griffiths phase. We also find a symmetric Griffiths phase near the defector's extinction point when fluctuations are present, indicating that Griffiths phases may be frequent in evolutionary game dynamics and play a role in the coexistence of different strategies.