Evolutionary Game Theory

Evolutionary Game Theory applies game-theoretic reasoning to biological evolution and social dynamics, where populations of agents with different strategies interact repeatedly. Introduced by John Maynard Smith and George Price in 1973, the framework uses the concept of Evolutionarily Stable Strategies (ESS) to identify strategy distributions that cannot be invaded by mutant strategies. Replicator dynamics describe how strategy frequencies evolve over time when reproduction is proportional to payoff success.