On the Evolutionary Fitness of Bounded Rationality: Heterogeneous Populations in Antagonistic Interactions

Conventional game theory assumes hyper-rational players, while evolutionary game theory abandons the assumption. This paper studies what happens when agents of both profiles co-exist and get engaged in a series of antagonistic interactions (the Hawk-Dove game). It is shown that if rational agents are perfectly informed as to the type of their opponent, they find it optimal to always be aggressive (that is, always select “Hawk”) when paired with an irrational player. It is then shown that, generally, a similar result is also valid when rational agents fail to recognise the type of their opponent with certainty. Finally, a discussion on why it may be fruitful to consider populations heterogeneous as to the rationality of agents is provided.