Abstract
Deterministic evolutionary dynamics for games first appeared in the mathematical biology literature, where Taylor and Jonker (1978) introduced the replicator dynamic to provide an explicitly dynamic foundation for the static evolutionary stability concept of Maynard Smith and Price (1973). But one can find precursors to this approach in the beginnings of game theory: Brown and von Neumann (1950) introduced differential equations as a tool for computing equilibria of zero-sum games. In fact, the replicator dynamic appeared in the mathematical biology literature long before game theory itself: while Maynard Smith and Price (1973) and Taylor and Jonker (1978) studied game theoretic models of animal conflict, the replicator equation is equivalent to much older models from population ecology and population genetics. These connections are explained by Schuster and Sigmund (1983), who also coined the name ‘replicator dynamic’, borrowing the word ‘replicator’ from Dawkins (1982).
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Durlauf, S.N., Blume, L.E. (2010). Deterministic Evolutionary Dynamics. In: Durlauf, S.N., Blume, L.E. (eds) Game Theory. The New Palgrave Economics Collection. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230280847_7
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