Collective Evolutionary Dynamics and Spatial Reciprocity under the N-Person Snowdrift Game

The evolution of cooperation has been gathering increasing attention during the last decades. Most of the times, cooperative behavior involves more than two individuals, and the N-person Prisoner’s Dilemma, which is the most studied generalized social dilemma in this context, not always manages to capture those situations that often occur to humans. In such cases, the N-person Snowdrift Game (NSG) often provides an adequate alternative. Here we show, making use of the NSG, how spatial populations affect the average levels of cooperation, when compared with the results obtained under conventional evolutionary game theory, that is, for well-mixed populations.