# Existence of Evolutionarily Stable Strategies Remains Hard to Decide for a Wide Range of Payoff Values

@article{Melissourgos2017ExistenceOE,
title={Existence of Evolutionarily Stable Strategies Remains Hard to Decide for a Wide Range of Payoff Values},
author={Themistoklis Melissourgos and Paul G. Spirakis},
journal={ArXiv},
year={2017},
volume={abs/1701.08108}
}
• Published 27 January 2017
• Economics
• ArXiv
The concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS), introduced by Smith and Price [4], is a refinement of Nash equilibrium in 2-player symmetric games in order to explain counter-intuitive natural phenomena, whose existence is not guaranteed in every game. The problem of deciding whether a game possesses an ESS has been shown to be $$\varSigma _{2}^{P}$$-complete by Conitzer [1] using the preceding important work by Etessami and Lochbihler [2]. The latter, among other results, proved that…
2 Citations

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