Relative Payoffs and Evolutionary Spite — Evolutionary Equilibria in Games with Finitely Many Players

Evolutionary dynamics in games imply de–facto spiteful behavior of the players: In order to ‘survive’ the evolutionary process, players must perform better than their opponents. This means they maximize relative rather than absolute payoffs. The paper shows that there is a class of games resulting in different equilibria if played by maximizers of absolute or of relative payoffs, respectively. It is demonstrated that evolutionary equilibria (general ESS) can be found by formally maximizing relative payoffs. This method is analytically deduced and demonstrated at the examples of four well known games: the Cournot oligopoly game, the public goods game, the Tullock game of rent seeking and the Van Huyck et al. (1990) coordination game.