644-670: Evolutionary Game Theory

A few words on Evolutionary Game Theory:

About a month ago, Michael asked me to give my opinion on an article on cheating viruses and game theory. Coincidentally, I had to write a referee report on a paper about evolutionary game theory (EGT) only recently, so I have collected further material and ideas about this topic which I would like to share with you:

Jörgen Weibull's paper "What have we learned from Evolutionary Game Theory so far?" provides a great non-technical introduction to EGT. It gives a first idea of what EGT is all about. I very much appreciated the reference list of this paper as well. In Evolutionary game dynamic, Josef Hofbauer and Karl Sigmund dig a little deeper and provide some interesting insights into the relationship between systems of differential equations (inclusions) and special equilibrium refinements (notable ESS and ES). Finally, I would like to draw your attention to Daniel Friedman's paper "On economic applications of evolutionary game theory". This paper is also non-technical and its objective is to make the general ideas behind an evolutionary game theoretic model more tranparent. As the title suggests, Friedman gives a nice outline of how these ideas can be incorporated into economic models.

Links are omitted, but click through and check out the ways that evolutionary logic is used by economists.