The \(N\)-player war of attrition in the limit of infinitely many players (Q2342739)

The war of attrition is a game theoretical model of non-violent conflict resolution in animal population. The analysis of game theoretic models is usually based on the assumption that the agents act rationally when choosing strategies. To accommodate fore this, Maynard Smith and Price introduced the notion of evolutionary stable strategies (ESS) which form a subset of the Nash equilibria. Haigh and Cannings generalized the two player of the war of attrition to models involving several players. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the model of Haigh and cannings in the limit of infinitely many players, where the limit is taken in the sense hinted to above, restricting the analysis to the case of strictly increasing award sequences. The authors prove that the notion of ESS can be extended to games with many players much in the same way as Nash equilibria are defined for many players, and one can also give an efficient definition of ESS in population with infinitely many players. The results are illustrated with some numerical results and compare the dynamic and static model for different values of N. The paper is organized in five sections and four appendixes. The main result is given in section five.