Evolutionarily stable preferences

Abstract

The 50-year old definition of an evolutionarily stable strategy provided a key tool for theorists to model ultimate drivers of behavior in social interactions. For decades economists ignored ultimate drivers and used models in which individuals choose strate-gies based on their preferences. This article summarizes some key findings in the literature on evolutionarily stable preferences, which in the past three decades has proposed models that combine the two approaches: Nature equips individuals with preferences, which deter-mine their strategy choices, which in turn determines evolutionary success. The objective is to highlight complementarities and potential avenues for future collaboration between biologists and economists.

Replaced by

Ingela Alger, “Evolutionarily stable preferences”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, vol. 378, n. 1876, May 2023.

Reference

Ingela Alger, “Evolutionarily stable preferences”, IAST Working Paper, n. 22-144, August 2022, revised December 2022.