Evolutionary game theory and population dynamics

We consider a class of fully stochastic and fully distributed algorithms, that we prove to learn equilibria in games. Indeed, we consider a family of stochastic distributed dynamics that we prove to converge weakly (in the sense of weak convergence for probabilistic processes) towards their mean-field limit, i.e an ordinary differential equation (ODE) in the general case. We focus then on a class of stochastic dynamics where this ODE turns out to be related to multipopulati...

This manuscript contains nothing new, but synthesizes known results: For the theoretical population geneticist with a probabilistic background, we provide a summary of some key results on stochastic differential equations. For the evolutionary game theorist, we give a new perspective on the derivations of results obtained when using discrete birth-death processes. For the theoretical biologist familiar with deterministic modeling, we outline how to derive and work with stocha...

Population games can be regarded as a tool to study the strategic interaction of a population of players. Although several attention has been given to such field, most of the available works have focused only on the unconstrained case. That is, the allowed equilibrium of the game is not constrained. To further extend the capabilities of population games, in this paper we propose a novel class of primal-dual evolutionary dynamics that allow the consideration of constraints tha...

We consider three distinct discrete-time models of learning and evolution in games: a biological model based on intra-species selective pressure, the dynamics induced by pairwise proportional imitation, and the exponential / multiplicative weights (EW) algorithm for online learning. Even though these models share the same continuous-time limit - the replicator dynamics - we show that second-order effects play a crucial role and may lead to drastically different behaviors in e...

Controlling evolutionary game-theoretic dynamics is a problem of paramount importance for the systems and control community, with several applications spanning from social science to engineering. Here, we study a population of individuals who play a generic 2-action matrix game, and whose actions evolve according to a replicator equation -- a nonlinear ordinary differential equation that captures salient features of the collective behavior of the population. Our objective is ...

We discuss stochastic dynamics of finite populations of individuals playing games. We review recent results concerning the dependence of the long-run behavior of such systems on the number of players and the noise level. In the case of two-player games with two symmetric Nash equilibria, when the number of players increases, the population undergoes multiple transitions between its equilibria.

In this work we aim to analyze the role of noise in the spatial Public Goods Game, one of the most famous games in Evolutionary Game Theory. The dynamics of this game is affected by a number of parameters and processes, namely the topology of interactions among the agents, the synergy factor, and the strategy revision phase. The latter is a process that allows agents to change their strategy. Notably, rational agents tend to imitate richer neighbors, in order to increase the ...

These lecture notes introduce key concepts of mathematical population genetics within the most elementary setting and describe a few recent applications to microbial evolution experiments. Pointers to the literature for further reading are provided, and some of the derivations are left as exercises for the reader.

This paper studies a meta-simplex concept and geometric embedding framework for multi-population replicator dynamics. Central results are two embedding theorems which constitute a formal reduction of multi-population replicator dynamics to single-population ones. In conjunction with a robust mathematical formalism, this provides a toolset for analyzing complex multi-population models. Our framework provides a unifying perspective on different population dynamics in the litera...

The tragedy of the commons (TOC) is an unfortunate situation where a shared resource is exhausted due to uncontrolled exploitation by the selfish individuals of a population. Recently, the paradigmatic replicator equation has been used in conjunction with a phenomenological equation for the state of the shared resource to gain insight into the influence of the games on the TOC. The replicator equation, by construction, models a fixed infinite population undergoing microevolut...