'Group selection' is an oft-cited but controversial explanation for the survival of altruism. Rather than enter this debate, this paper asks whether a group structure alone can provide a reasonable explanation for the survival of altruistic behaviour in an evolving population. If altruism...

A finite population of agents playing a 2 x 2 symmetric game evolves by adaptive best response. The assumption that players make mistakes is dropped in favor of one where players differ, via payoff heterogeneity. Arbitrary mutations are thus replaced with an economically justified specification....

In an evolutionary setting, players are allowed to choose not only their strategies for a particular game but also to some extent with whom they will play. This can lead to complex dynamics. Here, simulations are used to obtain some preliminary conclusions. It is shown that the ability to form...

In the context of a "beauty-contest" coordination game (in which pay-offs depend on the quadratic distance of actions from an unobserved state variable and from the average action), players choose how much costly attention to pay to various informative signals. Each signal has an underlying...

In a Lucas-Phelps island economy, an island has access to many informative signals about demand conditions. Each signal incorporates both public and private information: the correlation of a signal׳s realizations across the economy determines its publicity. If information sources differ in...

Collective-action problems arise when private actions generate common consequences; for example, the private provision of a public good. This article asks: what shapes of public-good production function work well when play evolves over time, and hence moves between equilibria? Welfare-maximising...

Agents are drawn from a large population and matched to play a symmetric <InlineEquation ID="Equ1"> <EquationSource Format="TEX">$2\times2$</EquationSource> </InlineEquation> coordination game, the payoffs of which are perturbed by agent-specific heterogeneity. Individuals observe a (possibly sampled) history of play, which forms the initial hypothesis for an opponent's behaviour....</equationsource></inlineequation>

Collective-action problems arise in a variety of situations. Open-source software is a recent and important example. Copyright restrictions on open-source projects stipulate that any user may modify the software so long as any resulting innovation is freely available to all. In economic...

Coordination problems arise in a multitude of economic interactions. Recent advances in the field of game theory have shed new light on these problems and the ways in which they might be analysed. This issue of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy first examines some of the theoretical...