Evolutionary instability of zero-determinant strategies demonstrates that winning is not everything

Adami, Christoph; Hintze, Arend

doi:10.1038/ncomms3193

Cited by 176 publications

(152 citation statements)

References 29 publications

(55 reference statements)

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“…Regardless of the applied strategy updating rule, we let the system evolve towards the stationary state where the average frequency of strategies becomes time independent. The results obtained via strategy imitation and birth-death updating are quickly explained, and they are, in fact, qualitatively in agreement with the results obtained on well-mixed populations in that extortion strategies face a rather gloomy evolutionary outlook [36,37]. In particular, if b is low enough for cooperators to survive in the presence of defectors (which would be due to network reciprocity [7]), then E χ always die out regardless of χ .…”

Section: The Payoff Matrix Issupporting

confidence: 83%

“…Extortion strategies are therefore able to dominate any evolutionary opponent, including tit for tat and, in fact, all other strategies [35]. But in the realm of evolutionary games, where players are able to imitate strategies that are performing better, extortion quickly becomes widespread and, in fact, evolutionarily unstable [36]. If everybody extorts, it is better to cooperate.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Evolution of extortion in structured populations

2014

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Extortion strategies can dominate any opponent in an iterated prisoner's dilemma game. But if players are able to adopt the strategies performing better, extortion becomes widespread and evolutionary unstable. It may sometimes act as a catalyst for the evolution of cooperation, and it can also emerge in interactions between two populations, yet it is not the evolutionarily stable outcome. Here we revisit these results in the realm of spatial games. We find that pairwise imitation and birth-death dynamics return known evolutionary outcomes. Myopic best response strategy updating, on the other hand, reveals counterintuitive solutions. Defectors and extortioners coarsen spontaneously, which allows cooperators to prevail even at prohibitively high temptations to defect. Here extortion strategies play the role of a Trojan horse. They may emerge among defectors by chance, and once they do, cooperators become viable as well. These results are independent of the interaction topology, and they highlight the importance of coarsening, checkerboard ordering, and best response updating in evolutionary games.

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Section: The Payoff Matrix Issupporting

confidence: 83%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolution of extortion in structured populations

2014

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“…Press and Dyson's work can be further generalized to multi-player ZD strategies for investigating various social dilemmas, new features and constrains related to participant number and payoff structure have been revealed and the impact of ZD alliance in multi-player games has been studied [11,12]. Furthermore, there are also extensive literatures investigating the significance of ZD strategies in evolutionary game theory and in social networks [8,9,[12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. Although initially the evolutionary instability was found for extortion strategies [14], later it is proved that the generous strategies finally dominate in population and are stable in an evolutionary sense [8,15].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, there are also extensive literatures investigating the significance of ZD strategies in evolutionary game theory and in social networks [8,9,[12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. Although initially the evolutionary instability was found for extortion strategies [14], later it is proved that the generous strategies finally dominate in population and are stable in an evolutionary sense [8,15]. The above theoretical studies also have been implemented in realworld social experiments, it is confirmed that extorting others has limited prospects, and in the long run, generosity is more profitable [13].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extortion under uncertainty: Zero-determinant strategies in noisy games

2015

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Repeated game theory has been one of the most prevailing tools for understanding the long-run relationships, which are footstones in building human society. Recent works have revealed a new set of "zero-determinant (ZD)" strategies, which is an important advance in repeated games. A ZD strategy player can exert a unilaterally control on two players' payoffs. In particular he can deterministically set the opponent's payoff, or enforce an unfair linear relationship between the players' payoffs, thereby always seizing an advantageous share of payoffs. One of the limitations of the original ZD strategy, however, is that it does not capture the notion of robustness when the game is subjected to stochastic errors. In this paper, we propose a general model of ZD strategies for noisy repeated games, and find that ZD strategies have high robustness against errors. We further derive the pinning strategy under noise, by which the ZD strategy player coercively set the opponent's expected payoff to his desired level, although his payoff control ability declines with the increase of noise strength. Due to the uncertainty caused by noise, the ZD strategy player cannot secure his payoff to be higher than the opponent's, which implies strong extortions do not exist even under low noise. While we show that the ZD strategy player can still establish a novel kind of extortions, named weak extortions, where any increase of his own payoff always exceeds that of the opponent's by a fixed percentage, and the conditions under which the weak extortions can be realized are more stringent as the noise becomes stronger.

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“…Following in the tradition of Kropotkin andHuxley (1955 [1902]), for example, who wrote partly responding to the growing popularity of theories advancing social Darwinism, many natural and social scientists today dismiss simplistic representations of human nature as being inherently selfish, and in fact suggest the opposite (Clark 1991;Wilson 1998;Rilling, et al 2002;Chapman and Sussman 2004;Henrich and Henrich 2007;West et al 2007;Adami and Hintze 2013). And while still dominant in the field of international relations and political theory, the political realism that partly originated in the writings of Hobbes has come under significant attack from Critical Theorists and others concerned with its integral commitment to reproducing relations of domination and power (Ashley 1981;Cox 1981;George 1994;Vasquez 1998).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Turning conflict into collaboration in managing commons: A case of Rupa Lake Watershed, Nepal

Chaudhary¹,

Chhetri

Dorman

et al. 2015

Int J Commons

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A collaborative effort to manage watershed commons 745Abstract: A growing body of literature on the commons has provided fascinating and intricate insights on how some local institutions have successfully managed to avoid a seemingly inevitable "tragedy of the commons" once popularized by Garrett Hardin. Primarily benefitting from the recent studies on the commonpool resources conducted by Elinor Ostrom and colleagues, polycentric selforganization and autonomy, rather than the direct state or market control over the commons, are often recognized as key features of the long enduring commons. However, these commons are quite diverse and the outcomes are often multiple and complex, accentuating the needs to differentiate among multiple commons outcomes. Furthermore, relatively under-reported are the cases where the degradation of common-pool resources are actually halted, and even restored. This study examines both the turbulent history of fishery mismanagement in Rupa Lake, Nepal and its reversal built around the participation, engagement and inclusiveness in the governance of its watershed. We find that Rupa Lake's experience tells two stories. Reflecting Hardin's dire forecast, the Rupa Lake watershed verged on collapse as population grew and seemingly selfish behavior intensified under an open-access regime. But the users also found a way to rebound and reverse their course as they adopted a bottom-up approach to fishery management and established an innovative community institution, the 'Rupa Lake Rehabilitation and Fishery Cooperative', dedicated to the sustainable governance of the commons. This case highlights how one community at the threshold of 'tragedy' transformed itself by turning conflict into collaboration, which we hope contributes to the effort of better understanding multiple commons.Keywords: Biodiversity, collective action, governance, institutions, watersheds Acknowledgements: The authors would like to thank the people in Rupa cooperatives for sharing valuable information and time with us, and LI-BIRD that has been continuously making endeavour to strengthen the cooperatives' capacity through support from different funding partners. Netra Chhetri, Brian Dorman and Milan Shrestha were supported by the USAID Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Collaborative Research for Adapting Livestock Systems to Climate Change at Colorado State University under sub-award 9650-30. The constructive comments from the reviewers have helped improve the quality of the manuscript and thus we are grateful to them.

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Evolutionary instability of zero-determinant strategies demonstrates that winning is not everything

Cited by 176 publications

References 29 publications

Evolution of extortion in structured populations

Evolution of extortion in structured populations

Extortion under uncertainty: Zero-determinant strategies in noisy games

Turning conflict into collaboration in managing commons: A case of Rupa Lake Watershed, Nepal

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