2017-07-27: Matteo Cavaliere (Edinburgh)

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 16:51:42 +0000

Matteo Cavaliere (Edinburgh)

The Rise and Fall of Cooperative Communities

Abstract

Social, biological and economic networks grow and decline with recurrent fragmentation and re-formation, often explained in terms of external perturbations. I will present a model of dynamical networks and evolutionary game theory that explains these phenomena as consequence of imitation and endogenous conflicts between "cooperators" and "cheaters". Cooperators promote well-connected prosperous (but fragile) networks and cheaters cause the network to fragment and lose its prosperity. Once the network is fragmented it can be reconstructed by a new invasion of cooperators, leading to recurrent cycles of formation and fragmentation observed, for instance, in bacterial communities and socio-economic networks. In the last part of the talk, I will briefly introduce my current works on the role of individual decision-making in cooperative communities and the possibility of synthetic biology to address these ideas in microbial communities.

References

M. Cavaliere, S. Sedwards, C.E. Tarnita, M.A. Nowak, A. Csikasz-Nagy.
Prosperity is Associated with Instability in Dynamical Networks.
Journal of Theoretical Biology, 299, 2012.

Plasticity Facilitates Sustainable Growth in the Commons.
M. Cavaliere, J.F. Poyatos.
Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 10, 2013.

Eco-Evolutionary Feedbacks can Rescue Cooperation in Microbial Populations.
C. Moreno-Fenoll, M. Cavaliere, E. Martinez-Garcia, J.F. Poyatos.
Scientific Reports, 7, 2017.

2017-07-27 14:00:00 UTC
LT1415