New doubly-anomalous Parrondo’s games suggest emergent sustainability and inequality

Abstract

Parrondo’s games to date have largely focused on the dynamics of capital mean, and not capital spread—the potential of the framework in modelling ecological and socioeconomic sustainability and inequality has thus been ignored. Based on behavioural heuristics of distinct individualistic and multipartite interactive strategies, we introduce a novel multi-agent Parrondo game structure with dynamics dependent upon local inequality. Intriguingly, we observe the presence of doubly-anomalous scenarios, in which there is paradoxical population growth despite both pure strategies being losing, simultaneously accompanied by a suppression of inter-population capital variance to within constant bounds. Ecologically, this reflects sustainable population proliferation amidst disadvantageous conditions; the converse scenario in turn corresponds to inequality-plagued unsustainable growth. Different connectivity topologies, such as scale-free and random networks, are also investigated.