Journal Article

Evolutionary games in the multiverse

Gokhale, Chaitanya S, Traulsen, Arne

2010

Overview

Evolutionary game dynamics of two players with two strategies has been studied in great detail. These games have been used to model many biologically relevant scenarios, ranging from social dilemmas in mammals to microbial diversity. Some of these games may, in fact, take place between a number of individuals and not just between two. Here we address one-shot games with multiple players. As long as we have only two strategies, many results from two-player games can be generalized to multiple players. For games with multiple players and more than two strategies, we show that statements derived for pairwise interactions no longer hold. For two-player games with any number of strategies there can be at most one isolated internal equilibrium. For any number of players Formula with any number of strategies Formula , there can be at most Formula isolated internal equilibria. Multiplayer games show a great dynamical complexity that cannot be captured based on pairwise interactions. Our results hold for any game and can easily be applied to specific cases, such as public goods games or multiplayer stag hunts.

• Publisher: National Academy of Sciences,National Acad Sciences
• Subject: Biodiversity / Biological Evolution / Biological Sciences / Cooperative Behavior / equations / Evolution / Evolutionary biology / Evolutionary games / Game Theory / Humans / Interpersonal Relations / mammals / Microbiology / Microorganisms / Models, Biological / Payoff matrix / Population dynamics / Public goods / public services and goods / Social evolution / Social interaction / Social Sciences / Toxins