Coevolutionary genetic algorithms for establishing Nash equilibrium in symmetric Cournot games (Q1958421)

Summary: We use coevolutionary genetic algorithms to model the players' learning process in several Cournot models and evaluate them in terms of their convergence to the Nash equilibrium. The ``social-learning'' versions of the two coevolutionary algorithms we introduce establish Nash Equilibrium in those models, in contrast to the ``individual learning'' versions which, do not imply the convergence of the players' strategies to the Nash outcome. When players use ``canonical coevolutionary genetic algorithms'' as learning algorithms, the process of the game is an ergodic Markov chain; we find that in the ``social'' cases states leading to Nash equilibrium play are highly frequent at the stationary distribution of the chain, in contrast to the ``individual learning'' case, when Nash equilibrium is not reached at all in our simulations; and finally we show that a large fraction of the games played are indeed at the Nash equilibrium.