Evolutionary dynamics of continuous strategy games on graphs and social networks under weak selection

Understanding the emergence of cooperation among selfish individuals has been a long-standing puzzle, which has been studied by a variety of game models. Most previous studies presumed that interactions between individuals are discrete, but it seems unrealistic in real systems. Recently, there are increasing interests in studying game models with a continuous strategy space.

Existing research work on continuous strategy games mainly focuses on well-mixed populations. Especially, little theoretical work has been conducted on their evolutionary dynamics in a structured population. In the previous work (Zhong et al., BioSystems, 2012), we showed that under strong selection, continuous and discrete strategies have significantly different equilibrium and game dynamics in spatially structured populations.

In this paper, we further study evolutionary dynamics of continuous strategy games under weak selection in structured populations. By using the fixation probability based stochastic dynamics, we derive exact conditions of natural selection favoring cooperation for the death-birth updating scheme. We also present a network gain decomposition of the game equilibrium, which might provide a new view of the network reciprocity in a quantitative way.

Finally, we make a detailed comparison between games using discrete and continuous strategies. As compared to the former, we find that for the latter (i) the same selection conditions are derived for the general 2×2 game; especially, the rule b/c>k in a simplified Prisoner's Dilemma is valid as well; however, (ii) for a coordination game, interestingly, the risk-dominant strategy is disfavored.

Numerical simulations have also been conducted to validate our results.