Skyrms, B.: Evolutionary dynamics of collective action

In the natural world, performing a given task which is beneficial to an entire group often requires the cooperation of several individuals of that group who often share the workload required to perform the task. The modeling toolkit to address problems related with the dynamics of collective action and other conflict of interests is game theory, often combined with its dynamical counterpart, Evolutionary Game Theory [1]. In this context, the last decades have witnessed the discovery of key insights into the emergence and sustainability of cooperation at different levels of organization. Special attention has been paid to two-person dilemmas such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD), the Snowdrift Game (SG) and the Stag-Hunt game (SH), which constitute powerful metaphors to describe conflicting situations often encountered in the natural and social sciences. Yet, unlike two-person games, current models of collective action have typically overlooked the necessity of some form of coordination among individuals, pervasive in biological and social collective dilemmas [2]. From social organization to the salvation of the planet against environmental hazards [3, 4], examples abound where a minimum number of individuals, which does not necessarily equal the entire group, must simultaneously cooperate before any outcome (or public good) is produced. With this abstract we intend to discuss the predictions of evolutionary game theory for the emergence of collective action, whenever a minimum threshold of individuals must cooperate simultaneously in a group before any viable public good is achieved. These conclusions were previously reported i