Abstract
According to John Maynard Smith in his influential book Evolution and the Theory of Games (1982, p. 10), an ESS (that is, an evolutionarily stable strategy) is ‘a strategy such that, if all members of the population adopt it, then no mutant strategy could invade the population under the influence of natural selection’. The ESS concept, based on static fitness comparisons, was originally introduced and developed in the biological literature (Maynard Smith and Price, 1973) as a means to predict the eventual outcome of evolution for individual behaviours in a single species. It avoids the complicated dynamics of the evolving population that may ultimately depend on spatial, genetic and population size effects.
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Durlauf, S.N., Blume, L.E. (2010). Learning and Evolution in Games: ESS. In: Durlauf, S.N., Blume, L.E. (eds) Game Theory. The New Palgrave Economics Collection. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230280847_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230280847_21
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