title: Evolutionary dynamics of general group interactions in structured populations.
abstract: The evolution of populations is influenced by many factors, and the simple classical models have been developed in a number of important ways. Both population structure and multiplayer interactions have been shown to significantly affect the evolution of important properties, such as the level of cooperation or of aggressive behavior. Here we combine these two key factors and develop the evolutionary dynamics of general group interactions in structured populations represented by regular graphs. The traditional linear and threshold public goods games are adopted as models to address the dynamics. We show that for linear group interactions, population structure can favor the evolution of cooperation compared to the well-mixed case, and we see that the more neighbors there are, the harder it is for cooperators to persist in structured populations. We further show that threshold group interactions could lead to the emergence of cooperation even in well-mixed populations. Here population structure sometimes inhibits cooperation for the threshold public goods game, where depending on the benefit to cost ratio, the outcomes are bistability or a monomorphic population of defectors or cooperators. Our results suggest, counterintuitively, that structured populations are not always beneficial for the evolution of cooperation for nonlinear group interactions.
authors.affiliation: Center for Systems and Control, College of Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.|Center for Complex Network Research and Department of Physics, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.|Department of Physics, Physics of Living Systems Group, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
authors.forename: Aming
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics, City University London, Northampton Square, London EC1V 0HB, UK.
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Broom
authors.affiliation: Center for Systems and Control, College of Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
authors.forename: Jinming
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Du
authors.affiliation: Center for Systems and Control, College of Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
authors.forename: Long
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Wang
mesh_terms: D005075:Biological Evolution; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D005716:Game Theory