EVOLUTION OF PREFERENCES, INCENTIVES, AND SOCIAL NETWORKS
| Abstract: A central question in both economics and biology is how agents with potentially conflicting interests can cooperate with each other. Three factors are central to this question: (i) the incentive structure of the game, (ii) how agents make decisions in social interactions, and (iii) the social structure of the population in which the interactions take place. I will present a series of models that look at how these three factors evolve. First, I will talk about how the incentive structure of a simple game might evolve to sustain cooperation. Second, I will present some results on the evolution of preferences of agents that use simple decision-making heuristics. Finally, I will consider the determinants of social network structure in animals, identifying a generally applicable process that has implications for the evolution of social behaviors.
Preferences:Akcay, E., Van Cleve, J., Feldman, M. W., & Roughgarden, J. (2009) A theory for the evolution of other-regard integrating ultimate and proximate perspectives. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106:19061–19066Akcay, E & Van Cleve, J. (2012) Behavioral dynamics in structured populations pave the way to group optimality. The American Naturalist 179:257-269Dridi, S. and Akcay, E. (in prep) Learning to cooperate: The evolution of social rewards in repeated interactions Incentives:Akcay, E., & Roughgarden, J. (2011) The evolution of payoff matrices: providing incentives for cooperation. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 278:2198-2206Akcay, E., Meirowitz, A., Ramsay, K., Levin, S. A. (2012) Evolution of cooperation and skew under imperfect information. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109: 14936-14941 Networks:Ilany, A. and Akçay, E. (2016) Social inheritance can explain the structure of animal societies. Nature Communications. 7:12084 |