Survival of Dominated Strategies under Evolutionary Dynamics

Abstract: We prove that any evolutionary dynamic satisfying four mild requirements does not eliminate strictly dominated strategies in all games. We also show that existing elimination results for evolutionary dynamics are not robust to small changes in the specifications of the dynamics. Numerical analysis suggests that dominated strategies can persist at nontrivial frequencies even when the level of domination is not small.
This is  joint work with Joseph Hofbauer.

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Biography: William H. Sandholm is Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and the author of "Population Games and Evolutionary Dynamics" (forthcoming, MIT Press).

William Sandholm