ON THE DEFINITION OF AN EVOLUTIONARILY STABLE STRATEGY IN THE PLAYING THE FIELD MODEL

This paper considers a strengthening of Maynard Smith's definition of an evolutionarily stable strategy, or "ESS", discussed by Vickers & Cannings [Vickers, G. T. & Cannings, C. (1987). On the definition of an evolutionarily stable strategy. J. theor. Biol. 129, 349-353]. Vickers & Cannings showed that the stronger definition was equivalent to Maynard Smith's for the pairwise random matching model, as long as the game played by matched pairs has a finite number of pure strategies. This paper uses a different argument to extend their equivalence result to the "playing the field" model. © 1990 Academic Press Limited.