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Computational Economics (2025) 65:763–794
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10614-023-10536-7
Two‑Population Evolutionary Oligopoly withPartial
Cooperation andPartial Hostility
F.Lamantia1,2 · D.Radi2,3· T.Tichy2
Accepted: 5 December 2023 / Published online: 10 January 2024
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
2024
Abstract
In this paper, we reconsider the model in Bischi and Lamantia (J Econ Interact Coord
17:3–27, 2022) and reformulate it in a two-population context. There, the Cournot
duopoly market examined is in equilibrium (Cournot-Nash-equilibrium quantities
are produced) conditionally to the players’ (heterogeneous) attitudes toward coop-
eration. To accommodate players’ attitudes, their objective functions partly include
the opponent’s profit, resulting in greater (partial) cooperation or hostility toward
the opponent than in the standard duopoly setting. An evolutionary selection mecha-
nism determines the survival of cooperative or competitive strategies in the duopoly.
The game is symmetric and Bischi and Lamantia (J Econ Interact Coord 17:3–27,
2022) assumes that the two players involved start the game by choosing the same
strategic profile. In this way, the full-fledged two-population game simplifies in a
one-dimensional map. In this paper, we relax this assumption. On one hand, this
approach allows us to investigate entirely the dynamics of the model and the evolu-
tionary stability of the Nash equilibria of the static game that is implicit in the evo-
lutionary setup. In fact, the model with only one population partially represents the
system dynamics occurring in an invariant subset of the phase space. As a remarka-
ble result, this extension shows that the steady state of the evolutionary model where
all players are cooperative can be an attractor, although only in the weak sense, even
when it is not a Nash equilibrium. This occurs when firms have a very high pro-
pensity to change strategies to the one that performs better. On the other hand, this
approach allows us to accommodate players’ heterogeneity (non-symmetric version
of the game), whose analysis confirms the main insights attained in the homogene-
ous setting.
Keywords Oligopoly modeling· Partial cooperation· Evolutionary games· Multi-
population games· Nonlinear dynamics
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