Evolutionary games: From theory to human experiments (and back)
Alberto Antonioni
Mathematics Department, Carlos III University of Madrid
Avenida de la Universidad 30, 28911, Leganés, Spain
Collective social dynamics can be interpreted by the powerful mathematical tools of evolutionary game theory. Cooperation and coordination are two main emergent phenomena characterizing human interactions and our society. Understanding how such interactions take place and how individual decisions influence global outcomes is a fundamental question in the social sciences and it is of paramount importance for researchers and policy-makers. For instance, the recent environmental disasters and the still unsolved climate change problem have unveiled that researchers and policy-makers need to deal with uncertain, globalized and rapidly changing societies, where people and countries, deeply interconnected and exposed to diversity, take local decisions which, collectively, have global consequences. How to study such dynamics? My lecture is divided into three moments. We will first have a general introduction to evolutionary game theory, describing its main theoretical results. Secondly, we will dive into human experiments performed in a laboratory or online setting based on frameworks of cooperation and coordination games. We will finally move to the modelling part: with the aid of numerical simulations, we will browse theories and experiments to understand how to model observed human behaviour.
Slides
