Do People Play Nash Equilibrium? Lessons From Evolutionary Game Theory

Abstract

Evolutionary game theory provides an answer to two of the central questions in economic modeling: when is it reasonable to assume that people are rational? And, when is it reasonable to assume that behavior is part of a Nash equilibrium (and if it is reasonable, which equilibrium)? The traditional answers are not compelling, and much of evolutionary modeling is motivated by the need for a better answer. Evolutionary game theory suggests that, in a range of settings, agents do (eventually) play a Nash equilibrium. Moreover, evolutionary modeling has shed light on the relative plausibility of different Nash equilibria.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 279 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.