The effects of herding and dispersal behaviour on the evolution of cooperation on complete networks.

Abstract

Evolutionary graph theory has considerably advanced the process of modelling the evolution of structured populations, which models the interactions between individuals as pairwise contests. In recent years, these classical evolution models have been extended to incorporate more realistic features, e.g. multiplayer games. A recent series of papers have developed a new evolutionary framework including structure, multiplayer interactions, evolutionary dynamics, and movement. However, so far, the developed models have mainly considered independent movement without coordinated behaviour. Although the theory underlying the framework has been developed and explored in various directions, several movement mechanisms have been produced which characterise coordinated movement, for example, herding. By embedding these newly constructed movement distributions, within the evolutionary setting of the framework, we demonstrate that certain levels of aggregation and dispersal benefit specific types of individuals. Moreover, by extending existing parameters within the framework, we are not only able to develop a general process of embedding any of the considered movement distributions into the evolutionary setting on complete graphs but also analytically produce the probability of fixation of a mutant on a complete N-sized network, for the multiplayer Public Goods and Hawk-Dove games. Also, by applying weak selection methods, we extended existing previous analyses on the pairwise Hawk-Dove Game to encompass the multiplayer version considered in this paper. By producing neutrality and equilibrium conditions, we show that hawks generally do worse in our models due to the multiplayer nature of the interactions.