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Do group dynamics change how cooperation spreads?

Anzhi Sheng, Alex McAvoy, Ye Tian, Silun Zhang, Angela Fontan, Joshua B. Plotkin

May 22, 2026

Most models treat social interactions as pairwise connections, but real groups involve simultaneous multi-person influence—think team sports or committee decisions. This work extends the classical toolkit (pair approximation) to handle groups of any size, showing that cooperation thresholds shift unpredictably when payoffs depend on group membership. The same framework predicts how traits spread through group inheritance—useful for disease modeling and evolutionary dynamics.
Published as Hyperedge approximation for stochastic processes on higher-order networks arXiv:2605.23444
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