Evolutionary games with environmental feedbacks

Strategic interactions form the basis for evolutionary game theory and often occur in dynamic environments. The various strategies employed in a population may alter the quality or state of the environment, which may in turn feedback to change the incentive structure of strategic interactions. This type of feedback is common in social-ecological systems, evolutionary-ecological systems, and even psychological-economic systems – where the state of the environment alters the dynamics of competing types, and vice versa. Here we develop a framework of “eco-evolutionary game theory” that permits the study of joint strategic and environmental dynamics, with feedbacks. We consider environments governed either by a renewable resource (e.g. common-pool harvesting) or a decaying resource (e.g. pollution byproducts). We show that the dynamics of strategies and the environment depend, crucially, on the incentives for individuals to lead or follow behavioral changes, and on the relative speed of environmental versus strategic change. Our analysis unites dynamical phenomena that occur in settings as diverse as human decision-making, plant nutrient acquisition, and resource harvesting. We discuss the implication of our results for fields ranging from ecology to economics.