We study rerouting policies in a dynamic round-based variant of a well known game theoretic traffic model due to Wardrop. Previous analyses (mostly in the context of selfish routing) based on Wardrop’s model focus mostly on the static analysis of equilibria. In this paper, we ask the question whether the population of agents responsible for routing the traffic can jointly compute or better learn a Wardrop equilibrium efficiently. The rerouting policies that we study are of the following kind. In each round, each agent samples an alternative routing path and compares the latency on this path with its current latency. If the agent observes that it can improve its latency then it switches with some probability depending on the possible improvement to the better path. We can show various positive results based on a rerouting policy using an adaptive sampling rule that implicitly amplifies paths that carry a large amount of traffic in the Wardrop equilibrium. For general asymmetric games, we show that a simple replication protocol in which agents adopt strategies of more successful agents reaches a certain kind of bicriteria equilibrium within a time bound that is independent of the size and the structure of the network but only depends on a parameter of the latency functions, that we call the relative slope. For symmetric games, this result has an intuitive interpretation: Replication approximately satisfies almost everyone very quickly. In order to achieve convergence to a Wardrop equilibrium besides replication one also needs an exploration component discovering possibly unused strategies. We present a

This paper explains why seemingly irrational overconfident behavior can persist. Information aggregation is poor in groups in which most individuals herd. By ignoring the herd, the actions of overconfident individuals (“entrepreneurs”) convey their private information. However, entrepreneurs make mistakes and thus die more frequently. The socially optimal proportion of entrepreneurs trades off the positive information externality against high attrition rates of entrepreneurs, and depends on the size of the group, on the degree of overconfidence, and on the accuracy of individuals ’ private information. The stationary distribution trades off the fitness of the group against the fitness of overconfident individuals. Starting any company is really hard to do, so you can’t be so smart that it occurs to you that it can’t be done.

Game theory is one of the key paradigms behind many scientific disciplines from biology to behavioral sciences to economics. In its evolutionary form and especially when the interacting agents are linked in a specific social network the underlying solution concepts and methods are very similar to those applied in non-equilibrium statistical physics. This review gives a tutorial-type overview of the field for physicists. The first four sections introduce the necessary background in classical and evolutionary game theory from the basic definitions to the most important results. The fifth section surveys the topological complications implied by non-mean-field-type social network structures in general. The next three sections discuss in detail the dynamic behavior of three prominent classes of models: the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Rock–Scissors–Paper game, and Competing Associations. The major theme of the review is in what sense and how the graph structure of interactions can modify and enrich the picture of long term behavioral patterns emerging in evolutionary games.

Abbreviations frequently used: T – Payoff for defecting on a cooperator R – Payoff for mutual cooperation P – Payoff for mutual defection S – Payoff for cooperating with a defector NoC – Network of Contacts SI – Supporting Information Real populations have been shown to be heterogeneous, in which some individuals have many more contacts than others. This fact contrasts with the traditional homogeneous setting used in studies of evolutionary game dynamics. We incorporate heterogeneity in the population by studying games on graphs, in which heterogeneity ranges from single-scale graphs, where it is small and associated degree distributions exhibit a Gaussian tail, to scale-free graphs, where it is large with degree-distributions exhibiting a power-law behavior. We study the evolution of cooperation, modeled in terms of the most popular dilemmas of cooperation. We show that, for all dilemmas, increasing heterogeneity favors the emergence of cooperation, such that long-term cooperative behavior easily resists short-term non-cooperative behavior. Moreover, we show how cooperation depends on the intricate ties between individuals in scale-free populations. accepted 15-dec-2005 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; published online 16-feb-2006 2 1.

This paper provides deterministic approximation results for stochastic processes that arise when finite populations recurrently play finite games. The processes are Markov chains, and the approximation is defined in continuous time as a system of ordinary differential equations of the type studied in evolutionary game theory. We establish precise connections between the long-run behavior of the discrete stochastic process, for large populations, and its deterministic flow approximation. In particular, we provide probabilistic bounds on exit times from and visitation rates to neighborhoods of attractors to the deterministic flow. We sharpen these results in the special case of ergodic processes.

The replicator equation used in evolutionary game theory (EGT) assumes that strategies reproduce in direct proportion to their payoffs; this is akin to the use of fitness-proportionate selection in an evolutionary algorithm (EA). In this paper, we investigate how various other selection methods commonly used in EAs can affect the discrete-time dynamics of EGT. In particular, we show that the existence of evolutionary stable strategies (ESS) is sensitive to the selection method used. Rather than maintain the dynamics and equilibria of EGT, the selection methods we test impose a fixed-point dynamic virtually unrelated to the payoffs of the game matrix, give limit cycles, or induce chaos. These results are significant to the field of evolutionary computation because EGT can be understood as a coevolutionary algorithm operating under ideal conditions: an infinite population, noiseless payoffs, and complete knowledge of the phenotype space. Thus, certain selection methods, which may operate effectively in simple evolution, are pathological in an ideal-world coevolutionary algorithm, and therefore du- bious under real-world conditions.

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Given an undirected graph with weights on the vertices, the maximum weight clique problem (MWCP) is to find a subset of mutually adjacent vertices (i.e., a clique) having largest total weight. This is a generalization of the classical problem of finding the maximum cardinality clique of an unweighted graph, which arises as a special case of the MWCP when all the weights associated to the vertices are equal. The problem is known to be NP -hard for arbitrary graphs and, according to recent theoretical results, so is the problem of approximating it within a constant factor. Although there has recently been much interest around neural network algorithms for the unweighted maximum clique problem, no effort has been directed so far towards its weighted counterpart. In this paper, we present a parallel, distributed heuristic for approximating the MWCP based on dynamics principles developed and studied in various branches of mathematical biology. The proposed framework centers aroun...

We study the properties of two new relaxation labeling schemes described in terms of differential equations, and hence evolving in countinuous time. This contrasts with the customary approach to defining relaxation labeling algorithms which prefers discrete time. Continuous-time dynamical systems are particularly attractive because they can be implemented directly in hardware circuitry, and the study of their dynamical properties is simpler and more elegant. They are also more plausible as models of biological visual computation. We prove that the proposed models enjoy exactly the same dynamical properties as the classical relaxation labeling schemes, and show how they are intimately related to Hummel and Zucker's now classical theory of constraint satisfaction. In particular, we prove that, when a certain symmetry condition is met, the dynamical systems' behavior is governed by a Liapunov function which turns out to be (the negative of) a well-known consistency measure. Moreover, we p...