Publication
Effects of asynchronism on evolutionary games
| Name: | Description: | Size: | Format: | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3.35 MB | Adobe PDF |
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
We analyze the influence of the update dynamics on symmetric 2-player evolutionary games, which are
among the most used tools to study the emergence of cooperation in populations of interacting agents.
A synchronous dynamics means that, at each time step, all the agents of the population update their
strategies simultaneously. An extreme case of asynchronism is sequential dynamics, in which only one
agent is updated each time. We first show that these two opposite update dynamics can lead to very
different outcomes and that sequential dynamics is detrimental to the emergence of cooperation only
when the probability of imitating the most successful neighbors is high. In this sense, we can say that,
when the update dynamics has some influence, in general asynchronism is beneficial to the emergence of
cooperation.Wethen explore the consequences of using intermediate levels of asynchronism, where only
a fraction of the agents update their behavior each time. In general, the level of cooperation changes
smoothly and monotonically as we gradually go from synchronous to sequential dynamics. However,
there are some exceptions that should be taken into account. In addition, the results show that the
possibility of agents taking irrational decisions has a key role in the sensitivity of thesemodels to changes
in the update dynamics. Explanations for the observed behaviors are advanced.
Description
Keywords
Evolutionary game theory Evolutionary games Structured populations Asynchronism Artificial life
Citation
Grilo, Carlos; Correia, Luís. 2011. "Effects of asynchronism on evolutionary games", Journal of Theoretical Biology 269, 1: 109 - 122.