Strategic interactions arise in all domains of life. This form of competition often plays out in dynamically changing environments. The strategies employed in a population may alter the state of the environment, which may in turn feedback to change the incentive structure of strategic interactions. Feedbacks between strategies and the environment are common in social-ecological systems, evolutionary-ecological systems, and even psychological-economic systems. Here we develop a framework of 'eco-evolutionary game theory' that enables the study of strategic and environmental dynamics with feedbacks. We consider environments governed either by intrinsic growth, decay, or tipping points. We show how the joint dynamics of strategies and the environment depend on the incentives for individuals to lead or follow behavioral changes, and on the relative speed of environmental versus strategic change. Our analysis unites dynamical phenomena that occur in settings as diverse as human decision-making, plant nutrient acquisition, and resource harvesting. We discuss implications in fields ranging from ecology to economics.
Strategic interactions form the basis for evolutionary game theory and often occur in dynamic environments. The various strategies employed in a population may alter the quality or state of the environment, which may in turn feedback to change the incentive structure of strategic interactions. This type of feedback is common in social-ecological systems, evolutionary-ecological systems, and even psychological-economic systemswhere the state of the environment alters the dynamics of competing types, and vice versa. Here we develop a framework of "eco-evolutionary game theory" that permits the study of joint strategic and environmental dynamics, with feedbacks. We consider environments governed either by a renewable resource (e.g. common-pool harvesting) or a decaying resource (e.g. pollution byproducts). We show that the dynamics of strategies and the environment depend, crucially, on the incentives for individuals to lead or follow behavioral changes, and on the relative speed of environmental versus strategic change. Our analysis unites dynamical phenomena that occur in settings as diverse as human decision-making, plant nutrient acquisition, and resource harvesting. We discuss the implication of our results for fields ranging from ecology to economics.In many interactions, an individual's payoff depends on both her own strategy or type, 1 as well as the strategic composition in the entire population. Such interactions arise across 2 a range of disciplines, from micro-economics to animal behavior, and they have been ana-3 lyzed using game theory (Nash, 1950; Maynard Smith, 1982). Game-theoretic analysis of 4 competing types typically assumes that the form of strategic interaction is fixed in time, or 5 that it depends on an independent exogenous environment. Real-world systems, however, 6 often feature bi-directional feedbacks between the environment and the nature of strategic 7 interactions: an individual's payoff depends not only her actions relative to the population, 8 but also on the state of the environment, and the state of the environment is influenced by
Rising inequalities and accelerating global environmental change pose two of the most pressing challenges of the twenty-first century. To explore how these phenomena are linked, we apply a social-ecological systems perspective and review the literature to identify six different types of interactions (or “pathways”) between inequality and the biosphere. We find that most of the research so far has only considered one-directional effects of inequality on the biosphere, or vice versa. However, given the potential for complex dynamics between socioeconomic and environmental factors within social-ecological systems, we highlight examples from the literature that illustrate the importance of cross-scale interactions and feedback loops between inequality and the biosphere. This review draws on diverse disciplines to advance a systemic understanding of the linkages between inequality and the biosphere, specifically recognizing cross-scale feedbacks and the multidimensional nature of inequality.
The presence of prosocial preferences is thought to reduce significantly the difficulty of solving societal collective action problems such as providing public goods (or reducing public bads). However, prosociality is often limited to members of an in-group. We present a general theoretical model where society is split into subgroups and people care more about the welfare of others in their own subgroup than they do about those in out-groups. Individual contributions to the public good spill over and benefit members in each group to different degrees. We then consider special cases of our general model under which we can examine the consequences of localized prosociality for the economic outcomes of society as a whole. We ask to what extent prosociality closes the welfare gap between the Nash equilibrium without prosociality and the social optimum. The answer depends on whether private and public inputs are good or poor substitutes in producing final output. Critically, the degree to which this welfare gap closes is a concave function of the level of prosociality in the case of poor substitutes, so even low levels of prosociality can lead to social welfare near the social optimum.
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