AN EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TO PRE-PLAY COMMUNICATION

We add a round of pre-play communication to a finite two-player game p layed by a population of players. Pre-play communication is cheap talk in the sense that it does not directly enter the payoffs. The paper c haracterizes the set of strategies that are stable with respect to a s tochastic dynamic adaptive process. Periodically players have an oppor tunity to change their strategy with a strategy that is more successfu l against the current population. Any strategy that weakly improves up on the current poorest performer in the population enters with positiv e probability. When there is no conflict of interest between the playe rs, only the efficient outcome is stable with respect to these dynamic s. For general games the set of stable payoffs is typically large. Eve ry efficient payoff recurs infinitely often.