So let's talk about this a little bit. Evolutionary Game Theory is branch of game theory created by biologist John Maynard Smith (no relation to Keynes) in 1970s to model interactions btwn animals and organisms. In short, it's about, sex, signaling, and very strange cooperations.
His 1982 book, Evolution and the Theory of Games, is the "origin of species" of the field, and is also one of my bibles. Other than founding it, JMS's major contributions to the field include evolutionary stability and the Hawk & Dove game still played in the Fed.
A key tenet of evolutionary game theory is that it doesn't start from a rational actor model, but from a variety of potential strategies, and observes evolutionary success of the strategies within populations. This is what makes it so compelling to economists wary of rationality.
Today there are roughly two fields within evolutionary game theory: replicator dynamics and strategy revision.
Replicator dynamics expresses the success of a strategy in an interaction by increasing the likelihood of a replication in the population.
Replicator dynamics expresses the success of a strategy in an interaction by increasing the likelihood of a replication in the population.
Strategy revision (or social interaction) starts from a set of competing strategies and the assumptions of myopia, social learning, and mutation. It is in a way the modeling of the middle game in chess, where best strategies cannot be backward-induced from known outcomes.
There are obvious links between evolutionary game theory and genetic algorithms as well as evolutionary statistics.
As a field, it's also a whole lot more fun because you can model the emergence of habits, rituals, herding behavior, and folk mores as invasion-proof strategies.
As a field, it's also a whole lot more fun because you can model the emergence of habits, rituals, herding behavior, and folk mores as invasion-proof strategies.
You can also think of stuff like altruism, eusociality, signaling, parasitism, spite, xenophobia, paternal and maternal instincts, symbiotic interactions, kin selection, anxiety, and creativity, without contorting them into a rational actor model.
All that, and sex.
All that, and sex.
Bonus tweet: the missing link between evolutionary game theory and normie game theory is Thomas Schelling's Micromotives and Macrobehavior, aka the book that explains everything.
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