Berlin 2012 – scientific programme

Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help

SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 16: Award Ceremony: Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics

SOE 16.2: Prize Talk

Wednesday, March 28, 2012, 18:50–19:30, H 0105

The evolution of cooperation in simple agent based models — •Arne Traulsen — Max Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, Germany

Why would I help someone that I will certainly never see again? Why should I cut down my CO₂ emissions if my neighbor drives an SUV? The evolution of cooperation, one of the most challenging problems in sociobiology, is attracting growing interest from a community of interdisciplinary researchers.

Based on the interaction of agents, evolutionary game theory is a key approach to analyze the dynamics on networks. Methods from theoretical physics, combined with data from economic experiments, can help to shed light on the problem of cooperation in humans. Some cases call for detailed behavioral models with many parameters, but in other cases a coarse grained phenomenological description is more appropriate. Stochastic evolutionary game dynamics based on minimalistic agents bridges between these two approaches and allows analyzing the impact of noise in these systems. This leads to entirely new perspectives on models for the evolution of cooperation and several new dynamical phenomena.