Games, Volume 1, Issue 1

Game and decision theory start from rather strong premises. Preferences, represented by utilities, beliefs represented by probabilities, common knowledge and symmetric rationality as background assumptions are treated as “given.” A richer language en...

Experimental and empirical evidence shows that the utility an individual derives from a certain state depends on the reference state she compares it to. According to economic theory, the reference state is determined by past, present and future outco...

Explaining human cooperation in large groups of non-kin is a major challenge to both rational choice theory and the theory of evolution. Recent research suggests that group cooperation can be explained by positing that cooperators can punish non-coop...

We introduce a class of evolutionary game dynamics — pairwise comparison dynamics — under which revising agents choose a candidate strategy at random, switching to it with positive probability if and only if its payoff is higher than the agent’s curr...

Over the last fifty years, game theory has evolved from a mathematical theory of optimal behaviour in stylized situations (“games”) to a general theory of human behaviour, be it actually observed or normatively desirable. Its scope includes both the...