ICES Experimental Economics Brown Bag Lecture
Culture and Strategic Diversity in Evolutionary Simple Dynamics
Friday, December 5, 2025 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM EST
Vernon Smith Hall (formerly Metropolitan Building), Room 5075
The Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science (ICES) presents an ICES Brown Bag Lecture featuring:
George Mason University
Culture and Strategic Diversity in Evolutionary Simple Dynamics
Abstract
In this paper, we extend Kristian Lindgren's evolutionary model of the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma by introducing cultural evolution alongside biological evolution: instead of a homogenous noise variable, we let agents set their own “individualism” variable that modifies the base noise level. To measure the aggregate effects of both biological and cultural evolution on strategy dynamics, we use an information distance measure of how similar strategies are to each other. We use this to build an aggregate “strategic diversity” index and test to see the effect of both biological and cultural evolution on strategic diversity in the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma model.
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