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Saptarshi Pal

@saptarshi.bsky.social
155 followers 144 following 11 posts

Postdoctoral fellow in Harvard. You may know me from when I was a PhD student in the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology. saptarshi07.github.io/personal-webs…

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Reposted by Saptarshi Pal
Ben Allen @evodynamics.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
NEW PUBLICATION: “Adaptive Dynamics of Discriminate and Indiscriminate Mating”, with Sam Rothberg & Brian Lerch. We model and analyze the evolution of indiscriminate mating—where organisms mate with others regardless of their sex. academic.oup.com/evolut/advan...
academic.oup.com
Adaptive dynamics of discriminate and indiscriminate mating
Abstract. Same-sex sexual behavior (SSB) occurs across many animal taxa. Some instances of SSB likely arise from animals’ mating indiscriminately and/or wi
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Reposted by Saptarshi Pal
Terence Tao @teorth.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
A group of 25 Fields Medalists, including myself, have made a joint declaration on Math and AI: mathandai.org . We welcome additional signatories. See also this article in the Economist announcing the declaration: www.economist.com/science-and-...
mathandai.org
Declaration — Math and AI
Read the declaration and add your name.
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Mehmet Mars Seven ♞ @mehmetmars7.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
🧵1/ How damaging is zero-sum thinking? Shaun Hargreaves Heap and I revisit the Nash vs maximin discussion We show that for every Nash equilibrium, there is a strategically equivalent game in which each player’s maximin strategy guarantees their Nash-equilibrium payoff
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Reposted by Saptarshi Pal
Joshua B. Plotkin @jplotkin.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Happy to share a new paper led by the terrific Anzhi Sheng. We find that allocation policies that promote cooperation tend to concentrate benefits among the well-connected. And so structured societies must weigh collective success against the inequality it generates. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Cooperation conflicts with equality when allocating public goods

Anzhi Sheng, Qi Su, Alex McAvoy, Long Wang & Joshua B. Plotkin 
Nature  655, 1217-1225 (2026)

Cooperation is typically seen as the ideal outcome in a social dilemma. Because cooperators are vulnerable to exploitation, much of the literature has focused on mechanisms, such as spatial structure, that support prosocial behaviour and the production of public goods1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11. Yet the rules for distributing these goods also shape behaviour and long-term prosperity. Here we study policies for allocating public goods, comparing equitable allocation, in which returns are proportional to potential contributions, with uniform allocation, in which all individuals receive equal shares. For most social networks, we find that uniform allocation facilitates the spread of cooperation compared with equitable allocation. But this success comes with a cost. Uniform allocation concentrates resources in a small number of highly connected individuals12, whereas peripheral individuals receive fewer benefits and may even be worse off than in a non-cooperative society. We develop a theoretical analysis of the tension between cooperation and equality, and we identify this conflict across diverse empirical social networks. Our results show that inequality may be an unavoidable consequence of allocation policies designed to foster cooperation in spatially heterogeneous populations. The question of how to promote cooperation is therefore incomplete: because policies that facilitate cooperation can also generate social stratification, we must weigh the benefits of cooperation against the inequality that accompanies it.
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Saptarshi Pal @saptarshi.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
nytimes.com
This Cell Feeds, Grows and Reproduces. And It’s Manmade.
From chemical building blocks, scientists have created synthetic cells that have most of the hallmarks of life.
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Saptarshi Pal @saptarshi.bsky.social · 17/05/2026
Great workshop; learnt a lot of cool things and met a lot of cool people!
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Saptarshi Pal @saptarshi.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
Hey all! Been away from BSky for a while but this Friday I am giving a talk on our latest PNAS Nexus paper on repeated games! We model situations where players, instead of acting simultaneously, act in order. We study the status of well-known equilibrium strategies when simultaneity is broken.
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Simon Columbus @simoncolumbus.bsky.social · 06/04/2026
This week's Cooperation Colloquium: Saptarshi Pal (Harvard) From simultaneous to leader-follower play in direct reciprocity Date: April 10 Time: 15:00 UTC+2 (Vienna) / 9am ET (NYC) Sign up here: list.ku.dk/postorius/li...
Abstract: Repeated interaction is a key mechanism driving the evolution of cooperation, generosity, extortion, and other social behaviors. These behaviors are typically studied using two-player repeated games, where the two players act simultaneously in every round. In this paper, we begin with a standard two-action repeated game, but transform it into a leader–follower game. We do this by forcing one player to indicate their impending move, or to openly commit first in each round. We show that this simple transformation provides new and useful analytical insights. In particular, we use this transformation to derive expressions for the main classes of simultaneous-move Nash equilibria of memory-1, when payoffs are discounted. We show that these equilibria also remain stable under the leader–follower structure. We prove that this reassuring property does not always extend to games with more than two actions or to equilibrium strategies with longer memory. Overall, we establish a novel connection between repeated simultaneous-move games and repeated leader–follower games in evolutionary game theory. This approach offers fruitful means of investigating how prediction and anticipation play a role in stable social behavior.
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Saptarshi Pal @saptarshi.bsky.social · 02/07/2025
A different view of direct reciprocity in the evolution of cooperation. The enduring strategy in an evolving population need not be discriminators if unconditional cooperators can occasionally mutate to a conditional strategy in presence of defectors. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
royalsocietypublishing.org
Stabilizing unconditional cooperation | Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences
The ultimate goal of research on the evolution of cooperation could be conceived as finding a method for stabilizing strategies that always cooperate, that never deviate from cooperation, that never e...
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Ben Allen @evodynamics.bsky.social · 02/04/2025
I mean, as someone whose life's work has been developing general mathematical theory for evolution, I do think there is some scope to do theory in a general way, while still acknowledging the limits of its applicability link.springer.com/article/10.1...
link.springer.com
A mathematical formalism for natural selection with arbitrary spatial and genetic structure - Journal of Mathematical Biology
We define a general class of models representing natural selection between two alleles. The population size and spatial structure are arbitrary, but fixed. Genetics can be haploid, diploid, or otherwi...
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theobioarne.bsky.social @theobioarne.bsky.social · 10/01/2025
🚨 Annual IMPRS Call for Doctoral Positions at MPI-EvolBio 🚨 🎓 Fully-funded 3.5-year doctoral projects available in diverse research areas! #PhD #ResearchOpportunities #IMPRS #Science evolbio.mpg.de/3801127/annu...
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Tobias Galla @tobiasgalla.bsky.social · 23/12/2024
Asymptotic Extinction in Large Coordination Games (with Desmond Chan, Bart De Keijzer, Stefanos Leonardos, Carmine Ventre) arxiv.org/abs/2412.15461 We show that, for large random coordination games, Q-Learning converges to a Quantal Response Equilibria near the >>>
arxiv.org
Asymptotic Extinction in Large Coordination Games
We study the exploration-exploitation trade-off for large multiplayer coordination games where players strategise via Q-Learning, a common learning framework in multi-agent reinforcement learning. Q-L...
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Nikoleta Glynatsi @nikoletaglyn.bsky.social · 30/12/2024
Looking for a light read during the holidays?🎄 Let me tell you about our new publication with Vince Knight & @marcharper.bsky.social on the properties of strategies in computer tournaments for the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (IPD) 🧵 journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
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Christian Hilbe @chilbe.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
In a new paper published today, @yohm.bsky.social and I discuss a general framework to make sense of social norms and different indirect reciprocity models. Below is a 🧵, here is the paper: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
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Joshua B. Plotkin @jplotkin.bsky.social · 23/12/2023
🚨The evolution of forecasting for decision-making in dynamic environments🚨 We explore a middle ground between rational economic and myopic evolutionary theories, when decisions feedback on environmental states. By A Tilman @erolakcay.bsky.social @VVLVasconcelos doi.org/10.1177/2633...
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Ben Grodeck🔸 @benleoecon.bsky.social · 27/09/2023
My profile is finally up on the Max Planck Institute's Dynamics of Social Behavior group website. I feel so privileged to be working with this amazing group of researchers! You can check out who we are and what we work on here: web.evolbio.mpg.de/social-behav...
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