Nonlinear eco-evolutionary games with global environmental fluctuations and local environmental feedbacks

Abstract

Environmental changes play a critical role in determining the evolution of social dilemmas in many natural or social systems. Generally, the environmental changes include two prominent aspects: the global time-dependent fluctuations and the local strategy-dependent feedbacks. However, the impacts of these two types of environmental changes have only been studied separately, a complete picture of the environmental effects exerted by the combination of these two aspects remains unclear. Here we develop a theoretical framework that integrates group strategic behaviors with their general dynamic environments, where the global environmental fluctuations are associated with a nonlinear factor in public goods game and the local environmental feedbacks are described by the ‘eco-evolutionary game’. We show how the coupled dynamics of local game-environment evolution differ in static and dynamic global environments. In particular, we find the emergence of cyclic evolution of group cooperation and local environment, which forms an interior irregular loop in the phase plane, depending on the relative changing speed of both global and local environments compared to the strategic change. Further, we observe that this cyclic evolution disappears and transforms into an interior stable equilibrium when the global environment is frequency-dependent. Our results provide important insights into how diverse evolutionary outcomes could emerge from the nonlinear interactions between strategies and the changing environments.