Abstract
I discuss recent work that characterizes what outcomes correspond to evolutionarily stable strategies in two-player symmetric repeated games when players have a positive probability of making a mistake.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
This chapter is based on work with D. Fudenberg.
- 2.
Roughly speaking, a strategy s is ES if no mutant strategy s ′ performs better than s in expectation against a population consisting mostly of s but with a small proportion of s ′.
- 3.
In fact, the situation is even worse than ALT would suggest. Consider the strategy that repeatedly follows the pattern C followed by twoDs until the pattern is broken, at which point it thereafter plays D. For the same reason as ALT, this more elaborate strategy is ES, yet it attains an average payoff of only \(\frac{2} {3}\). In fact, by continuing to add more Ds to the repeated pattern, we can obtain an ES strategy that is arbitrarily close in average payoff to the fully uncooperative strategy AD.
- 4.
A two-player game is symmetric if the two players have the same set of actions and if interchanging actions between the players causes the corresponding payoffs to be interchanged.
References
Axelrod R (1984) The evolution of cooperation. Basic Books
Axelrod R, Hamilton W (1981) The evolution of cooperation. Science 211:1390–1396
Fudenberg D, Maskin E (1986) The folk theorem in repeated games with discounting or with incomplete information. Econometrica 54(3):533–554 (Reprinted in A. Rubinstein (ed) Game theory in economics, London, Edward Elgar, 1995)
Fudenberg D, Maskin E (1990) Evolution and cooperation in noisy repeated games. Am Econ Rev 80:274–279
Fudenberg D, Maskin E (2007) Evolution and repeated games. Mimeo
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Maskin, E. (2009). Evolution, Cooperation, and Repeated Games. In: Levin, S. (eds) Games, Groups, and the Global Good. Springer Series in Game Theory. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85436-4_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85436-4_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-85435-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-85436-4
eBook Packages: Business and EconomicsEconomics and Finance (R0)