This dissertation consists of three essays on evolutionary game theory and its applications. The first essay considers mechanism design in the evolutionary game-theoretic framework. The second essay studies equilibrium selection of coordination games by using an evolutionary game-theoretic concept. The third essay formulates a multi-regional economic growth model as an evolutionary game and characterizes the stability of its equilibria under an evolutionary dynamic. The summaries of each essay are provided below. In the first essay, I consider an implementation problem in a class of congestion games with players that have heterogeneous costs of taking actions. One application is to traffic congestion with drivers having heterogeneous time costs. The planner would like to design a price scheme under which the economy converges to an epsilon-optimum from any initial state when he does not have full knowledge of the cost functions, and he can observe only the aggregate strategy distribution. Although the planner would like to internalize the externalities, the informational constraints compel him to estimate their values. Using the optimality and equilibrium conditions, I construct a practical estimation procedure that yields the true values of externalities in the long-run. Moreover, I show that our scheme makes the epsilon-optimum globally stable under the best response dynamic if the externalities among players taking the same action are sufficiently large relative to those among players taking different actions. In the second essay, I study the long-run outcomes of noisy asynchronous repeated games with players that are heterogeneous in in terms of their patience. The players repeatedly play a 2-by-2 coordination game with random pair-wise matching. The games are noisy because the players may make mistakes when choosing their actions and are asynchronous because only one player can move in each period. I characterize the long-run outcomes of Markov perfect equilibrium that are robust to the mistakes and show that if there is a sufficiently patient player, the efficient state can be the unique robust outcome even if it is risk-dominated. Because I need heterogeneity for the result, I argue that it enables the most patient player in effect to be the leader. In the third essay, I consider a microfounded urban growth model with two regions and a mass of mobile workers to study interactions among growth, agglomeration, and urban congestion. Unlike previous research in the urban growth literature, I formulate the model as a one-shot game and take an evolutionary game-theoretic approach for stability analysis. My approach enables us to analyze the stability of nonstationary equilibria in which populations of each region are not constant over time. I show that if both the expenditure share for housing and inter-regional transport cost are small, a stable stationary equilibrium does not exist. Moreover, in such a case, I show that there can exist a stable nonstationary equilibrium in which mobile workers agglomerate in one region at first but some of them migrate to the other region later. I argue that such a nonstationary location pattern is related to return migration.

This dissertation consists of three self-contained chapters. The first chapter studies the effect of introducing a bilingual option on the long run equilibrium outcome in a class of two-strategy coordination games with distinct payoff and risk dominant equilibria under the logit choice rule. Existing results show that in the class of two-strategy games under consideration, the inefficient risk dominant equilibrium is selected in the long run under noisy best response models. We show that if the cost of the bilingual option is sufficiently low then the efficient payoff dominant equilibrium will be selected in the long run under the logit choice rule. The second chapter studies a model of stochastic evolution under the probit choice rule. In the small noise double limit, where first the noise level in agents' decisions is taken to zero, and then the population size to infinity, escape from and transitions between equilibria can be described in terms of solutions to continuous optimal control problems. We use resultsfrom optimal control theory to solve the exit cost problem. This is used to determine the most likely exit paths from the initial basin of attraction and also to assess the expected time until the evolutionary process leaves the basin of attraction of a stable equilibrium in a class of three-strategy coordination games. The third chapter (joint work with Yuval Heller and Igal Milchtaich) studies the population dynamics under which each revising agent tests each action k times, with each trial being against a newly drawn opponent, and chooses the action whose mean payoff was highest during the testing phase. When k = 1, defection is globally stable in the prisoner's dilemma.By contrast, when k > 1 we show that, if the gains from defection are not too large, there exists a globally stable state in which agents cooperate with probability between 28% and 50%. Next, we characterize stability of strict equilibria in general games. Our results demonstrate that the empirically plausible case of k > 1 can yield qualitatively different predictions than the case k = 1 commonly studied in the literature.

Now in paperback, Did Darwin Get It Right discusses some of the hottest issues in biology today. Its author, the eminently quotable John Maynard Smith, discusses such fascinating conundrums as how life began, whether the brain works like a computer, why most animals and plants reproduce sexually, and how social behavior evolved out of the context of natural selection--a process which would seem to favor selfishness. A humorous and insightful writer, John Maynard Smith has the special ability to convey the excitement of science, its complexity and fascination, without baffling or boring his readers. In these 28 brief and accessible essays, Maynard ranges widely over such issues as science and the media, the birth of sociobiology, the evolution of animal intelligence and the limitations of evolutionary theory. For his work on the evolution of sex, Smith won the Darwin medal from the Royal Society, and he has pioneered the application of game theory to animal behavior.

This book presents a collection of linked essays written by one of the leading philosophers of biology, Kim Sterelny, on the topic of biological evolution. The first half of the book explores most of the main theoretical controversies about evolution and selection. Sterelny argues that genes are not the only replicators: non-genetic inheritance is also extremely important, and is no mere epiphenomenon of gene selection. The second half of the book applies some of these ideas in considering cognitive evolution. Concentrating on the mental capacities of simpler animals rather than those of humans, Sterelny argues for a general distinction between detection and representation, and that the evolution of belief, like that of representation, can be decoupled from the evolution of preference. These essays, some never before published, form a coherent whole that defends not just an overall conception of evolution, but also a distinctive take on cognitive evolution.