ICES Experimental Economics Brown Bag Lecture

Linear Strategy Distance: Measuring Strategy Similarity in Evolutionary Simple Dynamics

Thursday, May 1, 2025 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM EDT
Vernon Smith Hall (formerly Metropolitan Building), Room 5075

The Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science (ICES) presents an ICES Brown Bag Lecture featuring:

Walter Stover

Co-author Mahsa Nouri Zonouz

George Mason University

Linear Strategy Distance: Measuring Strategy Similarity in Evolutionary Simple Dynamics

 

 

 

Abstract

In this paper, I extend Kristian Lindgren's work in evolutionary game theory. In Lindgren's 1991 paper, "Evolutionary Phenomena in Simple Dynamics," he constructs an evolutionary model of a population playing the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma by encoding strategies as "genes" with binary representations. By introducing noise, Lindgren's evolutionary model displays remarkable historical dynamics and patterns in strategy use over time. However, modeling evolutionary dynamics in very large strategy spaces will become cumbersome to analyze, given the great number of possible strategies that can come into play. Thus, I propose a new method of mapping out game theoretic topography by introducing an information distance measure of how similar strategies are to each other. This will allow us to better quantify the degree of similarity of strategies that appear in evolutionary dynamics and say something about how different a new strategy is from the strategies that were played in the preceding history.

 

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