Evolutionary stability in extensive two-person games (Q790722)

The concept of an evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) was introduced by \textit{J. Maynard Smith} and \textit{G. R. Price} [``The logic of animal conflict'', Nature 246, 15--18 (1973)], and has given rise to a branch of game theory dealing with applications to sociobiology and evolution. Prior to the paper under review, evolutionary game theory had been developed in the framework of normal form games. Because an adequate description of sequential features of animal conflicts requires extensive game models, the author undertakes in this paper the task of generalizing the concept of ESS to extensive two-person games. It turns out to be not a straightforward task. After a rather thorough and exceedingly well written introduction to evolutionary stability in bimatrix games, extensive two-person games and strategies, the author extends the notion of symmetry from bimatrix games to extensive two-person games. While a symmetric extensive two-person game has a symmetric normal form which is an ordinary symmetric bimatrix game and the usual definition of ESS could be applied, this turns out to be unsatisfactory. A definition in terms of behavior strategies seems to be preferable, but the direct translation of the usual definition to the space of behavior strategies, called a direct ESS, is still unsatisfactory in the sense that some biological game models with intuitively plausible solutions do not have a direct ESS. The generalization ultimately proposed and investigated, called a limit ESS, is obtained by what has been referred to as the trembling hand approach, much like that which the author used in the refined perfectness definition in a previous paper [Int. J. Game Theory 4, 25--55 (1975; Zbl 0312.90072)] a sequence of perturbed games with small mistake probabilities is used. While this yields a more restrictive notion of equilibrium point, it makes the ESS notion less restrictive and avoids the difficulties mentioned above. After obtaining various theorems on the properties of a limit ESS, a many-period model of animal contests with ritual fights and escalated conflicts is investigated in detail.