We examine a scenario of social conflict that is manifest during an interaction between government servants providing a service and citizens who are legally entitled to the service, using evolutionary game-theory in structured populations characterized by an inter-dependent network. Bribe-demands by government servants during such transactions, called harassment bribes, constitute a widespread form of corruption in many countries. We investigate the effect of varying bribe demand made by corrupt officials and the cost of complaining incurred by harassed citizens, on the proliferation of corrupt strategies in the population. We also examine how the connectivity of the various constituent networks affects the spread of corrupt officials in the population. We find that incidents of bribery can be considerably reduced in a network-structured populations compared to mixed populations. Interestingly, we also find that an optimal range for the connectivity of nodes in the citizens network (signifying the degree of influence a citizen has in affecting the strategy of other citizens in the network) as well as the interaction network aids in the fixation of honest officers. Our results reveal the important role of network structure and connectivity in asymmetric games.

Societies rely on individual contributions to sustain public goods that benefit the entire community. Several mechanisms, that specify how individuals change their decisions based on past experiences, have been proposed to explain how altruists are not outcompeted by selfish counterparts. A key aspect of such strategy updates involves a comparison of an individuals latest payoff with that of a random neighbour. In reality, both the economic and social milieu often shapes cooperative behaviour. We propose a new decision heuristic, where the propensity of an individual to cooperate depends on the local strategy environment in which she is embedded as well as her wealth relative to that of her neighbours. Our decision-making model allows cooperation to be sustained and also explains the results of recent experiments on social dilemmas in dynamic networks. Final cooperation levels depend only on the extent to which the strategy environment influences altruistic behaviour but are largely unaffected by network restructuring. However, the extent of wealth inequality in the community is affected by a subtle interplay between the environmental influence on a persons decision to contribute and the likelihood of reshaping social ties, with wealth-inequality levels rising with increasing likelihood of network restructuring in some situations.

We consider competition between antibiotic producing bacteria, non-producers (or cheaters), and sensitive cells in a two-dimensional lattice model. Previous work has shown that these three cell types can survive in spatial models due to the presence of spatial patterns, whereas coexistence is not possible in a well-mixed system. We extend this to consider the evolution of the antibiotic production rate, assuming that the cost of antibiotic production leads to a reduction in growth rate of the producers. We find that coexistence occurs for an intermediate range of antibiotic production rate. If production rate is too high or too low, only sensitive cells survive. When evolution of production rate is allowed, a mixture of cell types arises in which there is a dominant producer strain that produces sufficient to limit the growth of sensitive cells and which is able to withstand the presence of cheaters in its own species. The mixture includes a range of low-rate producers and non-producers, none of which could survive without the presence of the dominant producer strain. We also consider the case of evolution of antibiotic resistance within the sensitive species. In order for the resistant cells to survive, they must grow faster than both the non-producers and the producers. However, if the resistant cells grow too rapidly, the producing species is eliminated, after which the resistance mutation is no longer useful, and sensitive cells take over the system. We show that there is a range of growth rates of the resistant cells where the two species coexist, and where the production mechanism is maintained as a polymorphism in the producing species and the resistance mechanism is maintained as a polymorphism in the sensitive species.