Evolutionarily Stable Strategies

The video explains that in evolutionary games, the best strategy for an agent to adopt depends on what others are doing, as agents’ strategies change over time. Biologists are interested in finding evolutionary stable strategies (ESS) that will endure over time. ESS must be effective against competitors when they are rare and successful later when they have grown to a high proportion of the population. A stable strategy in an evolutionary game does not have to be unbeatable, it only has to be uninvaded and thus stable over time. The concept of ESS is similar to the Nash equilibrium in classical game theory, but with some additional characteristics.