Strategic investment explains patterns of cooperation and cheating in a microbe.

ABSTRACT: Contributing to cooperation is typically costly, while its rewards are often available to all members of a social group. So why should individuals be willing to pay these costs, especially if they could cheat by exploiting the investments of others? Kin selection theory broadly predicts that individuals should invest more into cooperation if their relatedness to group members is high (assuming they can discriminate kin from nonkin). To better understand how relatedness affects cooperation, we derived the ‟Collective Investment" game, which provides quantitative predictions for patterns of strategic investment depending on the level of relatedness. We then tested these predictions by experimentally manipulating relatedness (genotype frequencies) in mixed cooperative aggregations of the soci

SUBMITTER: Madgwick PG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6003509 | biostudies-literature | 2018 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature