We study participation games with negative feedback, i.e. games where players choose either to participate in a certain project or not and where the payoff for participating decreases in the number of participating players. We use the replicator dynamics to model the competition between...

Classical economic theory assumes that people are rational and selfish, but behavioral experiments often point to inconsistent behavior, typically attributed to "other regarding preferences." The Ultimatum Game, used to study fairness, and the Trust Game, used to study trust and trustworthiness,...

In evolutionary models of indirect reciprocity, reputation mechanisms can stabilize cooperation even in severe cooperation problems like the prisoner's dilemma. Under certain circumstances, conditionally cooperative strategies, which cooperate iff their partner has a good reputation, cannot be...

I study the speed of the evolutionary process on small heterogeneous graphs using the Hawk-Dove game. The graphs are based on empirical observation data of grooming interactions in 81 primate groups. Analytic results for the star graph have revealed that irregular graphs can slow down the...

We introduce a class of evolutionary game dynamics - pairwise comparison dynamics - under which revising agents choose a candidate strategy at random, switching to it with positive probability if and only if its payoff is higher than the agent’s current strategy. We prove that all such...

Human social networks reshape continuously, as individuals forge new contacts while abandoning existing ones. Simultaneously, individuals adapt their behavior, leading to an intricate interplay been network evolution and behavior evolution. Here, we review a framework, called Active Linking,...

We propose a model in which agents of a population interacting according to a network of contacts play games of coordination with each other and can also dynamically break and redirect links to neighbors if they are unsatisfied. As a result, there is co-evolution of strategies in the population...

We study 4 x 4 games for which the best response dynamics contain a cycle. We give examples in which multiple Shapley polygons occur for these kinds of games. We derive conditions under which Shapley polygons exist and conditions for the stability of these polygons. It turns out that there is a...

There is continuing debate about what explains cooperation and self-sacrifice in nature and in particular in humans. This paper suggests a new way to think about this famous problem. I argue that, for an evolutionary biologist as well as a quantitative social scientist, the triangle of two...

We investigate aspects of institutional change in an evolutionary game-theoretic framework, in principle focusing on problems of coordination in groups when new solutions to a problem become available. In an evolutionary game with an underlying dilemma structure, we let a number of new...