An evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) is a strategy that is impermeable when adopted by a population in adaptation to a specific environment, that is to say it cannot be displaced by an alternative strategy which may be novel or initially rare. Introduced by John Maynard Smith and George R. Price in 1972/3, it is an important concept in behavioural ecology, evolutionary psychology, mathematical game theory and economics, with applications in other fields such as anthropology, philosophy and political science.
In game theory, the Nash equilibrium is the most commonly-used solution concept for non-cooperative games. A Nash equilibrium is a situation where no player could gain by changing their own strategy. The idea of Nash equilibrium dates back to the time of Cournot, who in 1838 applied it to his model of competition in an oligopoly.
The game of chicken, also known as the hawk-dove game or snowdrift game, is a model of conflict for two players in game theory. The principle of the game is that while the ideal outcome is for one player to yield, individuals try to avoid it out of pride, not wanting to look like "chickens". Each player taunts the other to increase the risk of shame in yielding. However, when one player yields, the conflict is avoided, and the game essentially ends.
In game theory, the best response is the strategy which produces the most favorable outcome for a player, taking other players' strategies as given. The concept of a best response is central to John Nash's best-known contribution, the Nash equilibrium, the point at which each player in a game has selected the best response to the other players' strategies.
A coordination game is a type of simultaneous game found in game theory. It describes the situation where a player will earn a higher payoff when they select the same course of action as another player. The game is not one of pure conflict, which results in multiple pure strategy Nash equilibria in which players choose matching strategies. Figure 1 shows a 2-player example.
In game theory, a move, action, or play is any one of the options which a player can choose in a setting where the optimal outcome depends not only on their own actions but on the actions of others. The discipline mainly concerns the action of a player in a game affecting the behavior or actions of other players. Some examples of "games" include chess, bridge, poker, monopoly, diplomacy or battleship.
In game theory, the stag hunt, sometimes referred to as the assurance game, trust dilemma or common interest game, describes a conflict between safety and social cooperation. The stag hunt problem originated with philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on Inequality. In the most common account of this dilemma, which is quite different from Rousseau's, two hunters must decide separately, and without the other knowing, whether to hunt a stag or a hare. However, both hunters know the only way to successfully hunt a stag is with the other's help. One hunter can catch a hare alone with less effort and less time, but it is worth far less than a stag and has much less meat. But both hunters would be better off if both choose the more ambitious and more rewarding goal of getting the stag, giving up some autonomy in exchange for the other hunter's cooperation and added might. This situation is often seen as a useful analogy for many kinds of social cooperation, such as international agreements on climate change.
In game theory, the battle of the sexes is a two-player coordination game that also involves elements of conflict. The game was introduced in 1957 by R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa in their classic book, Games and Decisions. Some authors prefer to avoid assigning sexes to the players and instead use Players 1 and 2, and some refer to the game as Bach or Stravinsky, using two concerts as the two events. The game description here follows Luce and Raiffa's original story.
In game theory, a solution concept is a formal rule for predicting how a game will be played. These predictions are called "solutions", and describe which strategies will be adopted by players and, therefore, the result of the game. The most commonly used solution concepts are equilibrium concepts, most famously Nash equilibrium.
In game theory, a Bayesian game is a strategic decision-making model which assumes players have incomplete information. Players may hold private information relevant to the game, meaning that the payoffs are not common knowledge. Bayesian games model the outcome of player interactions using aspects of Bayesian probability. They are notable because they allowed the specification of the solutions to games with incomplete information for the first time in game theory.
In game theory, a strategy Adominates another strategy B if A will always produces a better result than B, regardless of how any other player plays no matter how that player's opponent or opponents play. Some very simple games can be solved using dominance.
Rationalizability is a solution concept in game theory. It is the most permissive possible solution concept that still requires both players to be at least somewhat rational and know the other players are also somewhat rational, i.e. that they do not play dominated strategies. A strategy is rationalizable if there exists some possible set of beliefs both players could have about each other's actions, that would still result in the strategy being played.
In game theory, trembling hand perfect equilibrium is a type of refinement of a Nash equilibrium that was first proposed by Reinhard Selten. A trembling hand perfect equilibrium is an equilibrium that takes the possibility of off-the-equilibrium play into account by assuming that the players, through a "slip of the hand" or tremble, may choose unintended strategies, albeit with negligible probability.
In game theory, a correlated equilibrium is a solution concept that is more general than the well known Nash equilibrium. It was first discussed by mathematician Robert Aumann in 1974. The idea is that each player chooses their action according to their private observation of the value of the same public signal. A strategy assigns an action to every possible observation a player can make. If no player would want to deviate from their strategy, the distribution from which the signals are drawn is called a correlated equilibrium.
In game theory, the purification theorem was contributed by Nobel laureate John Harsanyi in 1973. The theorem justifies a puzzling aspect of mixed strategy Nash equilibria: each player is wholly indifferent between each of the actions he puts non-zero weight on, yet he mixes them so as to make every other player also indifferent.
In game theory, a subgame perfect equilibrium is a refinement of a Nash equilibrium used in dynamic games. A strategy profile is a subgame perfect equilibrium if it represents a Nash equilibrium of every subgame of the original game. Informally, this means that at any point in the game, the players' behavior from that point onward should represent a Nash equilibrium of the continuation game, no matter what happened before. Every finite extensive game with perfect recall has a subgame perfect equilibrium. Perfect recall is a term introduced by Harold W. Kuhn in 1953 and "equivalent to the assertion that each player is allowed by the rules of the game to remember everything he knew at previous moves and all of his choices at those moves".
Equilibrium selection is a concept from game theory which seeks to address reasons for players of a game to select a certain equilibrium over another. The concept is especially relevant in evolutionary game theory, where the different methods of equilibrium selection respond to different ideas of what equilibria will be stable and persistent for one player to play even in the face of deviations of the other players. This is important because there are various equilibrium concepts, and for many particular concepts, such as the Nash equilibrium, many games have multiple equilibria.
Proper equilibrium is a refinement of Nash Equilibrium by Roger B. Myerson. Proper equilibrium further refines Reinhard Selten's notion of a trembling hand perfect equilibrium by assuming that more costly trembles are made with significantly smaller probability than less costly ones.
In game theory, an epsilon-equilibrium, or near-Nash equilibrium, is a strategy profile that approximately satisfies the condition of Nash equilibrium. In a Nash equilibrium, no player has an incentive to change his behavior. In an approximate Nash equilibrium, this requirement is weakened to allow the possibility that a player may have a small incentive to do something different. This may still be considered an adequate solution concept, assuming for example status quo bias. This solution concept may be preferred to Nash equilibrium due to being easier to compute, or alternatively due to the possibility that in games of more than 2 players, the probabilities involved in an exact Nash equilibrium need not be rational numbers.
The Lemke–Howson algorithm is an algorithm that computes a Nash equilibrium of a bimatrix game, named after its inventors, Carlton E. Lemke and J. T. Howson. It is said to be "the best known among the combinatorial algorithms for finding a Nash equilibrium", although more recently the Porter-Nudelman-Shoham algorithm has outperformed on a number of benchmarks.
