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Defense Mechanisms of Empathetic Players in the Spatial Ultimatum Game

Attila Szolnoki, Matjaž Perc, and György Szabó
Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 078701 – Published 17 August 2012

Abstract

Experiments on the ultimatum game have revealed that humans are remarkably fond of fair play. When asked to share an amount of money, unfair offers are rare and their acceptance rate small. While empathy and spatiality may lead to the evolution of fairness, thus far considered continuous strategies have precluded the observation of solutions that would be driven by pattern formation. Here we introduce a spatial ultimatum game with discrete strategies, and we show that this simple alteration opens the gate to fascinatingly rich dynamical behavior. In addition to mixed stationary states, we report the occurrence of traveling waves and cyclic dominance, where one strategy in the cycle can be an alliance of two strategies. The highly webbed phase diagram, entailing continuous and discontinuous phase transitions, reveals hidden complexity in the pursuit of human fair play.

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  • Received 23 February 2012

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.078701

© 2012 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Attila Szolnoki1, Matjaž Perc2, and György Szabó1

  • 1Institute of Technical Physics and Materials Science, Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 49, H-1525 Budapest, Hungary
  • 2Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, University of Maribor, Koroška cesta 160, SI-2000 Maribor, Slovenia

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Vol. 109, Iss. 7 — 17 August 2012

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