The replicator equation in stochastic spatial evolutionary games

Abstract

We study the multi-strategy stochastic evolutionary game with death-birth updating in expanding spatial populations of size $N\to \infty$. The model is a voter model perturbation. For typical populations, we require perturbation strengths satisfying $1/N\ll w\ll 1$. Under appropriate conditions on the space, the limiting density processes of strategy are proven to obey the replicator equation, and the normalized fluctuations converge to a Gaussian process with the Wright-Fisher covariance function in the limiting densities. As an application, we resolve in the positive a conjecture from the biological literature that the expected density processes approximate the replicator equation on many non-regular graphs.