Virtual Labs in Evolutionary Game Theory is a brilliant site that affords hands-on experience with the kind of “public goods” games that led me (and others, of course) to believe that we have much to learn about the dynamics of cooperation and collective action.

Tutorial on voluntary participation in public goods games. Most theoretical and experimental work on social dilemmas such as the free-rider problem,the tragedy of the commons or the prisoner’s dilemma has tacitly built on the fact that the interacting individuals are actually caught in the dilemma. In most real-life examples, however, individuals do have considerable freedom to choose their partners. To explore the dynamics of this system in both, well-mixed populations as well as populations with rigid spatial structures, we provide further virtual labs. They demonstrate the persistent rock-sissors-paper-type cycles of cooperators, defectors and so called loners in mixed populations. The same mechanism acts as the driving force for travelling waves and other fascinating spatio-temporal patterns in populations arranged on a lattice.

< http://www.univie.ac.at/virtuallabs/ >