No Arabic abstract
Evolutionary game theory is used to model the evolution of competing strategies in a population of players. Evolutionary stability of a strategy is a dynamic equilibrium, in which any competing mutated strategy would be wiped out from a population. If a strategy is weak evolutionarily stable, the competing strategy may manage to survive within the network. Understanding the network-related factors that affect the evolutionary stability of a strategy would be critical in making accurate predictions about the behaviour of a strategy in a real-world strategic decision making environment. In this work, we evaluate the effect of network topology on the evolutionary stability of a strategy. We focus on two well-known strategies known as the Zero-determinant strategy and the Pavlov strategy. Zero-determinant strategies have been shown to be evolutionarily unstable in a well-mixed population of players. We identify that the Zero-determinant strategy may survive, and may even dominate in a population of players connected through a non-homogeneous network. We introduce the concept of `topological stability to denote this phenomenon. We argue that not only the network topology, but also the evolutionary process applied and the initial distribution of strategies are critical in determining the evolutionary stability of strategies. Further, we observe that topological stability could affect other well-known strategies as well, such as the general cooperator strategy and the cooperator strategy. Our observations suggest that the variation of evolutionary stability due to topological stability of strategies may be more prevalent in the social context of strategic evolution, in comparison to the biological context.
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 opponents 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 opponents 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 opponents, 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 opponents by a fixed percentage, and the conditions under which the weak extortions can be realized are more stringent as the noise becomes stronger.
Evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) is a key concept in evolutionary game theory. ESS provides an evolutionary stability criterion for biological, social and economical behaviors. In this paper, we develop a new approach to evaluate ESS in symmetric two player games with fuzzy payoffs. Particularly, every strategy is assigned a fuzzy membership that describes to what degree it is an ESS in presence of uncertainty. The fuzzy set of ESS characterize the nature of ESS. The proposed approach avoids loss of any information that happens by the defuzzification method in games and handles uncertainty of payoffs through all steps of finding an ESS. We use the satisfaction function to compare fuzzy payoffs, and adopts the fuzzy decision rule to obtain the membership function of the fuzzy set of ESS. The theorem shows the relation between fuzzy ESS and fuzzy Nash quilibrium. The numerical results illustrate the proposed method is an appropriate generalization of ESS to fuzzy payoff games.
Recently, Press and Dyson have proposed a new class of probabilistic and conditional strategies for the two-player iterated Prisoners Dilemma, so-called zero-determinant strategies. A player adopting zero-determinant strategies is able to pin the expected payoff of the opponents or to enforce a linear relationship between his own payoff and the opponents payoff, in a unilateral way. This paper considers zero-determinant strategies in the iterated public goods game, a representative multi-player evolutionary game where in each round each player will choose whether or not put his tokens into a public pot, and the tokens in this pot are multiplied by a factor larger than one and then evenly divided among all players. The analytical and numerical results exhibit a similar yet different scenario to the case of two-player games: (i) with small number of players or a small multiplication factor, a player is able to unilaterally pin the expected total payoff of all other players; (ii) a player is able to set the ratio between his payoff and the total payoff of all other players, but this ratio is limited by an upper bound if the multiplication factor exceeds a threshold that depends on the number of players.
The recent COVID-19 pandemic has led to an increasing interest in the modeling and analysis of infectious diseases. The pandemic has made a significant impact on the way we behave and interact in our daily life. The past year has witnessed a strong interplay between human behaviors and epidemic spreading. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary game-theoretic framework to study the coupled evolutions of herd behaviors and epidemics. Our framework extends the classical degree-based mean-field epidemic model over complex networks by coupling it with the evolutionary game dynamics. The statistically equivalent individuals in a population choose their social activity intensities based on the fitness or the payoffs that depend on the state of the epidemics. Meanwhile, the spreading of the infectious disease over the complex network is reciprocally influenced by the players social activities. We analyze the coupled dynamics by studying the stationary properties of the epidemic for a given herd behavior and the structural properties of the game for a given epidemic process. The decisions of the herd turn out to be strategic substitutes. We formulate an equivalent finite-player game and an equivalent network to represent the interactions among the finite populations. We develop structure-preserving approximation techniques to study time-dependent properties of the joint evolution of the behavioral and epidemic dynamics. The resemblance between the simulated coupled dynamics and the real COVID-19 statistics in the numerical experiments indicates the predictive power of our framework.
Since the recent introduction of several viable vaccines for SARS-CoV-2, vaccination uptake has become the key factor that will determine our success in containing the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that game theory and social network models should be used to guide decisions pertaining to vaccination programmes for the best possible results. In the months following the introduction of vaccines, their availability and the human resources needed to run the vaccination programmes have been scarce in many countries. Vaccine hesitancy is also being encountered from some sections of the general public. We emphasize that decision-making under uncertainty and imperfect information, and with only conditionally optimal outcomes, is a unique forte of established game-theoretic modelling. Therefore, we can use this approach to obtain the best framework for modelling and simulating vaccination prioritization and uptake that will be readily available to inform important policy decisions for the optimal control of the COVID-19 pandemic.