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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 21: Population Dynamics and Evolution

BP 21.5: Talk

Thursday, March 26, 2009, 18:30–18:45, HÜL 186

Estimating the Role of Fluctuations in Evolutionary Games — •Jonas Cremer¹, Tobias Reichenbach², and Erwin Frey¹ — ¹Arnold Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, Germany — ²Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Laboratory of Sensory Neuroscience, The Rockefeller University New York, NY USA

Evolutionary game theory describes the temporal development of different interacting strategies in a population. Within the standard formulation by replicator equations the dynamical behavior of simple evolutionary games is well known. This description, however, does not take stochasticity into account and thus fails if fluctuations are important. In such a case a stochastic description is required. Having investigated the effects of finite-size fluctuations within the asymmetric two-player game Battle of the Sexes [1] we now study the role of stochastic fluctuations within symmetric two-player games. We analyze mean extinction times, i.e. the time until coexistence of an originally mixed population is lost and only one strategy remains, and show that its dependence on the system size is a strong and general applicable concept to reveal the role of fluctuations on the evolutionary dynamics.

[1] Jonas Cremer, Tobias Reichenbach, and Erwin Frey, Eur. Phys. J. B 63 373-380 (2008)