Research

We were studying the emergence of intolerance in reputation-based models of indirect reciprocity. We have shown that intolerant behaviours can emerge under economic stress, especially in minorities. We also find that economic inequality promotes outbreaks of intolerance and that it is possible to prevent them if a correct redistribution of the wealth is performed before the first outbreak takes place.

The objective of this research is to study the evolution of cooperation in self-organizing social systems. We combine techniques from evolutionary game theory and collective behaviour to analyse the co-evolution of signalling and reciprocity. These models are also applied to problems related with division of labour. Finally we study the emergence of leadership.

We have deduced the general properties that cooperative strategies should have in order to be optimal in multi-agent dilemmas of arbitrary size and memory capacity, demonstrating that the strategies known so far are a subset of the. This project is a collaboration with researchers from IST Austria and Harvard University and its first results have already been published in PNAS.  

Commitments are widespread at all the levels of human societies, playing a key role in social interactions and being an evolutionarily viable strategy in social dilemmas. We have analysed the conditions for the emergence of different behaviours and mechanism, like apology, forgiveness, revenge, ostracism, reinsertion, and guilt. We have shown that, when the agreement fails, participants prefer to take revenge. Forgiveness is evolutionarily viable only when apology is sincere enough. We have also seen that ostracism should be avoided in general and that compensations and reinsertion are preferable. 

I have also worked on modelling microbiological systems in order to analyze the lag in the adaptive time and the heterogeneity of phenotypes of bacteria and yeast under changing environments. The final objective was shedding light in the processes related with the emergence of persister bacteria under antibiotic treatments and the adaptation of yeast to different carbon-based environments 

Before moving to Complex Systems, I did my PhD in Astrophysics, studying the formation and evolution of large structures in the local universe. During that time I was part of the CLUES Project, an international collaboration whose objective is to provide constrained simulations of the local universe in order to analyse the complex dark matter and gas-dynamical processes which govern the formation of galaxies. These simulations are specifically designed to reproduce the local large scale structure and the cosmic web using observational data.