Stochastic evolutionary dynamics of minimum-effort coordination games

摘要

The minimum-effort coordination game, having potentially importantimplications in both evolutionary biology and sociology, draws recently moreattention for the fact that human behavior in this social dilemma is ofteninconsistent with the predictions of classic game theory. In the framework ofclassic game theory, any common effort level is a strict and trembling handperfect Nash equilibrium, so that no desideratum is provided for selectingamong them. Behavior experiments, however, show that the effort levels employedby subjects are inversely related to the effort costs. Here, we combinecoalescence theory and evolutionary game theory to investigate this game infinite populations. Both analytic results and individual-based simulations showthat effort costs play a key role in the evolution of contribution levels,which is in good agreement with those observed experimentally. Besideswell-mixed populations, set structured populations, where the populationstructure itself is a consequence of the evolutionary process, have also beentaken into consideration. Therein we find that large number of sets andmoderate migration rate greatly promote effort levels, especially for higheffort costs. Our results may provide theoretical explanations for coordinationbehaviors observed in real life from an evolutionary perspective.