Matteo Cavaliere

Matteo Cavaliere abstract

Matteo Cavaliere, Synthsys, UoE

The Rise and Fall of Cooperative Communities.

Social, biological and economic networks grow and decline with recurrent fragmentation and  re-formation, often explained in terms of external perturbations. I will discuss a model of dynamical networks and evolutionary game theory that explains these phenomena as consequence of imitation and conflicts between "cooperators" and "cheaters" : Cooperators promote well-connected prosperous (but fragile) networks while cheaters lead to fragmented and unprosperous networks. However, a fragmented network can be reconstructed by a new invasion of cooperators, leading to recurrent cycles of formation and fragmentation observed, for instance, in bacterial communities and socio-economic networks. A variant of this network model can be helpful to study the role of cellular cooperation in the dynamics of tissues architecture during homeostasis and tumorigenesis. In the last part of the talk I will briefly introduce my ongoing works describing the impact of individual decision-making on the instability of cooperative communities.