Complexity Digest 2007.07 - 04

12-Feb-2007

Cooperation, Collectives Formation And Specialization, Adv. Complex Sys. Bookmark and Share

Excerpts: Cooperation in spatial evolutionary game theory has revealed various interesting insights into the problem of the evolution and maintenance of cooperative behavior. In social dilemmas, cooperators create and maintain a common resource at some cost to themselves while defectors attempt to exploit the resource without contributing. (...) Here we review recent advances in the dynamics of cooperation in structured populations as well as in situations where cooperative investments vary continuously. In such continuous games, the evolutionary (...) can lead to spontaneous diversification and specialization into high and low investing individuals which provides a natural explanation for the origin of cooperators and defectors.