Abstract
The ESS concept, developed in the 1970s to predict through static fitness comparisons the evolutionary outcome of individual behaviours in a biological species, emerged as the cornerstone of evolutionary game theory. This theory is now as central to the analysis of strategic interactions in the social and management sciences as in the life sciences. The ESS also addresses stability questions for dynamics describing how individual behaviours evolve over time. Here, we summarize ESS theory as originally developed for symmetric two-player games and then discuss generalizations to population games, extensive form games, games with continuous strategy spaces, asymmetric and bimatrix games.
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Cressman, R. (2018). Learning and Evolution in Games: ESS. In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_2655
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_2655
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