Constructed Games

To date, most analyses of evolutionary games have assumed that evolution is a unidirectional process: Natural selection is represented in the form of payoffs, and organisms must either adapt to the selective pressures in play, or die. Nevertheless, there is a growing consensus that organisms frequently engage in niche-constructing behaviors that alter the selective pressures they are subject to. Niche-constructing behaviors can be modeled game-theoretically, as behaviors that impact payoffs (and therefore relative fitness). I demonstrate that such behaviors enable cooperation to emerge from the prisoner’s dilemma and argue that niche construction likely impacts the evolutionary dynamics of other games.