Working Paper

Fending off one Means Fending off all: Evolutionary Stability in Submodular Games (new title: Fending off one means fending off all: evolutionary stability in quasi-submodular aggregative games)

Wolfgang Leininger
CESifo, Munich, 2004

CESifo Working Paper No. 1266

The implications of evolutionarily stable behavior in finite populations have recently been explored for a variety of aggregative games. This note proves an intimate relationship between submodularity and global evolutionary stability of strategies for these games, which -apart from being of independent interest - accounts for a number of results obtained in the recent literature: we show that any evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) of a submodular aggregative game must also be globally stable. I.e. if one mutant cannot successfully invade a population, any number of mutants can even less do so.