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An Application of Evolutionary Game Theory to Social Dilemmas: The Traveler's Dilemma and the Minimum Effort Coordination Game

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  • Swami Iyer
  • Joshua Reyes
  • Timothy Killingback

Abstract

The Traveler's Dilemma game and the Minimum Effort Coordination game are two social dilemmas that have attracted considerable attention due to the fact that the predictions of classical game theory are at odds with the results found when the games are studied experimentally. Moreover, a direct application of deterministic evolutionary game theory, as embodied in the replicator dynamics, to these games does not explain the observed behavior. In this work, we formulate natural variants of these two games as smoothed continuous-strategy games. We study the evolutionary dynamics of these continuous-strategy games, both analytically and through agent-based simulations, and show that the behavior predicted theoretically is in accord with that observed experimentally. Thus, these variants of the Traveler's Dilemma and the Minimum Effort Coordination games provide a simple resolution of the paradoxical behavior associated with the original games.

Suggested Citation

  • Swami Iyer & Joshua Reyes & Timothy Killingback, 2014. "An Application of Evolutionary Game Theory to Social Dilemmas: The Traveler's Dilemma and the Minimum Effort Coordination Game," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 9(4), pages 1-11, April.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0093988
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0093988
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    Cited by:

    1. Zheng, Liping & Xu, Hedong & Tian, Cunzhi & Fan, Suohai, 2021. "Evolutionary dynamics of information in the market: Transmission and trust," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 581(C).
    2. Eleonora Herrera-Medina & Antoni Riera Font, 2023. "A Game Theoretic Approach to Collaboration in Policy Coordination," Economies, MDPI, vol. 11(10), pages 1-9, October.
    3. Bandyopadhyay, Abhirup & Kar, Samarjit, 2018. "Coevolution of cooperation and network structure in social dilemmas in evolutionary dynamic complex network," Applied Mathematics and Computation, Elsevier, vol. 320(C), pages 710-730.
    4. Swami Iyer & Timothy Killingback, 2016. "Evolution of Cooperation in Social Dilemmas on Complex Networks," PLOS Computational Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(2), pages 1-25, February.
    5. Ye, Wenxing & Fan, Suohai, 2020. "Evolutionary traveler’s dilemma game based on particle swarm optimization," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 544(C).

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