Replicator-mutator dynamics with evolutionary public goods game-environmental feedbacks (Q6554425)

The paper presents an evolutionary game theoretic model of outcomes in a public goods game. A player's contribution to the public provides an immediate benefit to all players, and it also has a positive effect on the state of the environment. The state of the environment in turn influences the players' payoffs and their incentives to contribute. Relative to previous work, the model here emphasize the importance of including random mutations in the evolutionary dynamics governing players' strategies.\N\NThe authors characterize how limit behavior depends on parameters. The focus is to understand factors that lead to a cooperative outcome and avoid the tragedy of the commons. The main finding is to identify a condition on the feedback between the level of environmental quality and the marginal impact of players' contributions to environmental quality such that for low mutation rates, the system has a nontrivial limit cycle that represents ``an oscillating tragedy of the commons,'' as in [\textit{J. S. Weitz} et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 113, E7518--E7525 (2016; \url{doi:10.1073/pnas.1604096113})].