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Risk sensitivity and assortment in social dilemmas

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Abstract

Uncertainty and risk are key features of many social dilemmas, where individual decisions are often made with imperfect knowledge and variance in outcomes. In this paper, we investigate the evolutionary dynamics of the well-known public goods game using a recently introduced modelling framework encapsulating risk-sensitive assortment. Here, the population of mobile agents playing the game is divided into fixed-sized interaction groups. Individuals are defined by a single genetic trait—a risk sensitivity trait—that guides their decision-making. This trait is mapped to a continuous range of investment levels and also provides a mechanism to guide mobility (migration) decisions. Detailed computational simulation experiments confirm the relationship between risk orientation, decision-making and mobility in the game. As the size of each group increases, assortment levels tend to decrease and risk-averse individuals tend to dominate the population. However, in many scenarios, there was high variance in the proportion of ‘cooperators’ both in groups and between different groups, suggesting that risk-seeking behaviour is an emergent property of mobility induced positive assortment.

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Notes

  1. We have also run a large number of simulations using a range of V and k values. The results were qualitatively the same across a range of values, thus we do not include all results in this paper.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Australian Research Council (ARC) grant number DP130100845.

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Correspondence to Michael Kirley.

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All authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this manuscript.

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Communicated by B. Xue and A. G. Chen.

This is a revised and extended version of the SEAL 2014 conference paper by Kirley and von der Osten (2014).

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Kirley, M., von der Osten, F.B. Risk sensitivity and assortment in social dilemmas. Soft Comput 20, 3775–3786 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-016-2090-5

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