Speakers
Description
Game theory, a field that models strategic interactions, is seeing a resurgence throughout the theoretical biology and ecology communities. Well-established techniques are being brought to new applications, and traditional modelling approaches expanded through game-theoretic ideas, including evolutionary games, stochastic games, and learning in interacting populations. These tools provide a unifying language to study behaviour, adaptation, and feedbacks between ecological and evolutionary processes. As approaches to modelling ecology and evolution become more diverse, the need to reconcile and recognise existing approaches becomes more important.
This mini-symposium presents a spectrum of researchers ranging from game theorists to traditional mathematical biologists, facilitating discussion between communities that may not otherwise interact. The session will open with an accessible perspectives talk providing a broad introduction to, and overview of, game theory as a modelling framework. This perspective will stimulate discussion and demonstrate what game theory has to offer mathematical biology. We proceed through a diverse spectrum of applications, ranging from the evolution of cooperation and social behaviour to eco-evolutionary dynamics and strategic interactions in structured populations, to models that leverage competition and strategic decision-making to improve outcomes in management-relevant applications such as ecosystem conservation and cancer treatment.
