The Dilemma of Homo Moralis : Preference evolution in the prisoner's dilemma under assortative matching in finite populations without equilibrium assumptions

• Main Author: Nordström, Marcus
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: KTH, Skolan för datavetenskap och kommunikation (CSC) 2013
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-181952

Evolutionary game theory has made a big contribution to our understanding of evolutionary and economical processes. Recently, in the article Homo Moralis by Ingela Alger and Jörgen Weibull, a model extending classical evolutionary game theory in two ways is designed. Firstly the matching processes is allowed to be assortative and secondly the evolution is designed in such a way that it acts on preferences instead of strategies. They prove that an individual with a certain morality preference in such a setting can not be outperformed by an individual with another preference. To obtain the results, the authors model the population as a continuum and assume that equilibrium always is reached. In this thesis we design a model where these assumptions are relaxed and then test through computer simulations whether the results hold for the prisoner’s dilemma game. In our experiments we find no case where the results do not hold.