Equilibria and oscillations in cheat–cooperator dynamics
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cooperative societies can be threatened by cheats, who invest less in cooperation and exploit the contributions of others. The impact of cheats depends on the extent to which they are maintained in the population. However, different empirical studies, across organisms ranging from RNA replicators to bacteria, have shown diverse cheat-cooperator dynamics. These vary from approaching a stable equilibrium to dynamic cyclical oscillations. The reason for this variation remains unclear. Here, we develop a theoretical model to identify the factors that determine whether dynamics should tend toward stable equilibria or cyclical oscillations. Our analyses show that (1) a combination of both periodic population bottlenecks and density-dependent selection on cheating is required to produce cyclical oscillations and (2) the extent of frequency-dependent selection for cheating can influence the amplitude of these oscillations but does not lead to oscillations alone. Furthermore, we show that stochastic group formation (demographic stochasticity) can generate different forms of oscillation, over a longer time scale, across growth cycles. Our results provide experimentally testable hypotheses for the processes underlying cheat-cooperator dynamics.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it