Evolutionary dynamics over continuous action spaces for population games that arise from symmetric two-player games

Any absolutely continuous, piecewise smooth, symmetric two-player game can be extended to define a population game in which each player interacts with a large representative subset of the entire population. Assuming that players respond to the payoff gradient over a continuous action space, we obtain nonlinear integro-partial differential equations that are numerically tractable and sometimes analytically tractable. Economic applications include oligopoly, growth theory, and financial bubbles and crashes. © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. JEL classification: C73; D70