Preface: Second DGAA Special Issue on Evolutionary Games

Excerpt

Like its predecessor last year, this special issue of Dynamic Games and Applications is concerned with the theory and applications of evolutionary games. Evolutionary game theory initially arose in biology as a method to predict the outcome of natural selection acting on individual behaviors, with successful strategies having higher reproduction rates. One can trace the birth of the theory to the introduction of the notion of an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) by theoretical biologist John Maynard Smith. While the ESS concept can be viewed as a refinement of Nash equilibrium, which describes equilibrium behavior among rational agents in classical game theory, ESS has also proved to be a remarkably robust equilibrium notion for explicitly specified evolutionary dynamics. This is true whether this evolutionary dynamics emerges from biology or from one of the many other disciplines to which these ideas have spread, including computer science, economics, engineering, physics, and psychology. The contributions and author affiliations for these two special issues reflect this diversity. At the same time, there are common themes across the disciplines, evidenced by the following brief descriptions of the articles in this issue, that maintain evolutionary games as a unified field. …