The Alternating Prisoner's Dilemma is a variant of the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma in which the players alternate in the roles of actor and recipient. We searched for strategies which are "optimal" in the Alternating Prisoner's Dilemma with noise (a non-zero probability that a player's decision will be transmitted incorrectly). In order to achieve success against a variety of other strategies, ...

In a (generalized) symmetric aggregative game, payoffs depend only on individual strategy and an aggregate of all strategies. Players behaving as if they were negligible would optimize taking the aggregate as given. We provide evolutionary and dynamic foundations for such behavior when the game satisfies supermodularity conditions. The results obtained are also useful to characterize evolutiona...

In 1973, Maynard Smith and Price introduced game theory to the study of intraspecific conflicts. The resulting marriage has proved very fruitful of biological models (see Krebs and Davies (1978) for examples). Even simple, biologically intuitive games with a small number of strategies yield evolutionary stable equilibria with an unexpectedly rich mixture of strategy types. Furthermore, in the d...

A number of authors have provided a useful evolutionary perspective on personality disorders, arguing that personality traits can be conceptualized in terms of evolutionary strategies. If we consider personality traits not as illnesses but as stable evolutionary strategies, the characteristic features of borderline personality disorder may respond to a behavioral pattern which, although deviati...

Using the idea that life-history parameters are subject to natural selection and should approach values that are stable optima, with the population immune to invasion by mutant individuals, we derive an analytic expression for the evolutionarily stable dispersal rate in a stochastic island model with random site extinction. The results provide interesting contrasts between three different optim...

Insurance companies invest their wealth in financial markets. The wealth evolution strongly depends on the success of their investment strategies, but also on liquidity shocks which occur during unfavourable years, when indemnities to be paid to the clients exceed collected premia. An investment strategy that does not take liquidity shocks into account, exposes insurance companies to the risk o...

A stochastic evolutionary dynamics of two strategies given by 2x 2 matrix games is studied in finite populations. We focus on stochastic properties of fixation: how a strategy represented by a single individual wins over the entire population. The process is discussed in the framework of a random walk with site dependent hopping rates. The time of fixation is found to be identical for both stra...

In classical games that have been applied to ecology, individual fitness is either density independent or population density is fixed. This article focuses on the habitat selection game where fitness depends on the population density that evolves over time. This model assumes that changes in animal distribution operate on a fast time scale when compared to demographic processes. Of particular i...

In 1973 the biologist John Maynard Smith and the mathematician G. R. Price wrote an article in Nature showing how game theory applies to the behavior of animals (Maynard Smith and Price 1973). Maynard Smith went on to write a book on the subject (Maynard Smith 1982), which has become a classic. The idea of applying game theory to animals, and not just the higher primates, but fish, dung beetles...