Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2023 May 8;378(1876):20210505.
doi: 10.1098/rstb.2021.0505. Epub 2023 Mar 20.

Evolutionarily stable preferences

Ingela Alger  1   2   3   4
Affiliations
Review

Evolutionarily stable preferences

Ingela Alger. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. .

Abstract

The 50-year old concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy provided a key tool for theorists to model ultimate drivers of behaviour in social interactions. For decades, economists ignored ultimate drivers and used models in which individuals choose strategies based on their preferences-a proximate mechanism for behaviour-and the distribution of preferences in the population was taken to be fixed and given. 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: individuals inherit their preferences, the preferences determine their strategy choices, which in turn determine evolutionary success. One objective is to highlight complementarities and potential avenues for future collaboration between biologists and economists. This article is part of the theme issue 'Half a century of evolutionary games: a synthesis of theory, application and future directions'.

Keywords: altruism; game theory; morality; preference evolution.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

I declare I have no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
The payoff matrix of the simultaneous-move Stag hunt game (R > 1).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Maynard Smith J, Price GR. 1973. The logic of animal conflict. Nature 246, 15-18. (10.1038/246015a0) - DOI
    1. Frank RH. 1987. If Homo economicus could choose his own utility function, would he want one with a conscience? Am. Econ. Rev. 77, 593-604.
    1. Güth W, Yaari M. 1992. Explaining process and change: approaches to evolutionary economics. In Explaining reciprocal behavior in simple strategic games: an evolutionary approach (ed. Witt U), pp. 22-34. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
    1. McNamara JM, Gasson CE, Houston AI. 1999. Incorporating rules for responding into evolutionary games. Nature 401, 368-371. (10.1038/43869) - DOI - PubMed
    1. Taylor PD, Day T. 2004. Stability in negotiation games and the emergence of cooperation. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 271, 669-674. (10.1098/rspb.2003.2636) - DOI - PMC - PubMed

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources