Abstract

Public goods games are simple models to describe interactions between (two) biological species, where one produces the public good at a specific cost, while the other uses the produced good for free. In such a setup, the species that produces the public good is always less fit, and should eventually die out. Among a variety of stabilising effects on producers that have been discussed in the context of evolutionary game theory are space and time scale separation. I am interested in how the dominating species takes over the entire system in a variety of different types of these models, i.e. whether different types of spatial spreading behaviour of the dominant may be expected when slightly different models are assumed. I will discuss the different phenomenology with potential experimental applications in mind.