Human strategy updating in evolutionary games

By Arne Traulsen, Dirk Semmann, R. Sommerfeld, H. Krambeck, M. Milinski. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2010

398 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Evolutionary game dynamics describe not only frequency-dependent genetic evolution, but also cultural evolution in humans. In this context, successful strategies spread by imitation. It has been shown that the details of strategy update rules can have a crucial impact on evolutionary dynamics in theoretical models and, for example, can significantly alter the level of cooperation in social dilemmas. What kind of strategy update rules can describe imitation dynamics in humans? Here, we present a way to measure such strategy update rules in a behavioral experiment. We use a setting in which individuals are virtually arranged on a spatial lattice. This produces a large number of different strategic situations from which we can assess strategy updating. Most importantly, spontaneous strategy changes corresponding to mutations or exploration behavior are more frequent than assumed in many models. Our experimental approach to measure properties of the update mechanisms used in theoretical models will be useful for mathematical models of cultural evolution.

Subfields: Genetics, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e7d4acc5b928a5b66bfab2be95ec722fdc2238f7

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Citations in the corpus

Dynamic social networks promote cooperation in experiments with humans (2011, result): “And the comparison between our random and fixed conditions is again consistent with behavior in the physical laboratory (4, 5), where fixed interaction structure does little to prevent the breakdown of cooperation.”
Games on graphs (2014, background): “This dilution can thwart cooperative strategies whose success depends on spatial clustering [5], [114].”
Societal threat and cultural variation in the strength of social norms: An evolutionary basis (2015, neutral): “Results Study 1: Public Goods Game The PGG is a well-established paradigm for studying cooperation norms that has also been used to study punishment, i.e. norm enforcement (Brandt, Hauert, & Sigmund, 2006; Brandt et al., 2003; Hauert, 2010; Hilbe & Traulsen, 2012; Traulsen et al., 2010).”
Evolutionary Establishment of Moral and Double Moral Standards through Spatial Interactions (2010, neutral): “Besides well-mixed interactions, some researchers have also investigated the effect of spatial interactions [5,11,28,29], since it is known that they can support the survival or spreading of cooperators [30] (but this is not always the case [31,32]).”
Imitation dynamics of vaccination behaviour on social networks (2011, methodology): “We suppose that the probability that individual i adopts indi-95 vidual j ’s strategy is given by the Fermi function (Blume 1993, Szab´o & T˝oke 1998, Traulsen et al. 2007; 2010) where (cid:12) denotes the strength of selection (0 < (cid:12) < 1 ).”
The promise of Mechanical Turk: how online labor markets can help theorists run behavioral experiments. (2012, background): “updating within an experimental session may be characterized by extremely high rates of experimentation, which undermine the effects of spatial structure (Traulsen et al., 2010).”