Abstract
Evolutionary games provide the theoretical backbone for many aspects of our social life: from cooperation to crime, from climate inaction to imperfect vaccination and epidemic spreading, from antibiotics overuse to biodiversity preservation. An important, and so far overlooked, aspect of reality is the diverse strategic identities of individuals. While applying the same strategy to all interaction partners may be an acceptable assumption for simpler forms of life, this fails to account} for the behavior of more complex living beings. For instance, we humans act differently around different people. Here we show that allowing individuals to adopt different strategies with different partners yields a very rich evolutionary dynamics, including time-dependent coexistence of cooperation and defection, system-wide shifts in the dominant strategy, and maturation in individual choices. Our results are robust to variations in network type and size, and strategy updating rules. Accounting for diverse strategic identities thus has far-reaching implications in the mathematical modeling of social games.
Highlights
Game theory owes its popularity to its ability of describing social interactions as well as the gist of conflicting situations in economics and politics [1]
A frequently used subclass of evolutionary games is that of social dilemmas, in which what is best for the individual player conflicts with what is best for the society as a whole
When studying evolutionary games on networks, it is fitting to replace a single strategy of an individual with a strategy vector, such that it is possible for that individual to use different strategies in all its interactions
Summary
Evolutionary games provide the theoretical backbone for many aspects of our social life: from cooperation to crime, from climate inaction to imperfect vaccination and epidemic spreading, from antibiotics overuse to biodiversity preservation. Overlooked, aspect of reality is the diverse strategic identities of individuals. While applying the same strategy to all interaction partners may be an acceptable assumption for simpler forms of life, this fails to account for the behavior of more complex living beings. We show that allowing individuals to adopt different strategies with different partners yields a very rich evolutionary dynamics, including time-dependent coexistence of cooperation and defection, systemwide shifts in the dominant strategy, and maturation in individual choices. Accounting for diverse strategic identities has far-reaching implications in the mathematical modeling of social games
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