Introduction to agent-based evolutionary game theory

Evolutionary game theory is a discipline devoted to studying populations of individuals that are subject to evolutionary pressures, and whose success generally depends on the composition of the population. In biological contexts, individuals could be molecules, simple organisms or animals, and evolutionary pressures often take the form of natural selection and mutations. In socioeconomic contexts, individuals could be humans, firms or other institutions, and evolutionary pressures often derive from competition for scarce resources and experimentation.

In this talk I will give a very basic introduction to agent-based evolutionary game theory, a bottom-up approach to modelling and analyzing these systems. The defining feature of this modelling approach is that the individual units of the system and their interactions are explicitly and individually represented in the model. The models thus defined can be usefully formalized as stochastic processes, whose dynamics can be explored using computer simulation and approximated using various mathematical theories.