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Unpublished Paper
Evolution of Behavior in Family Games
Department of Economics, UCSB (2000)
  • Ted Bergstrom, University of California, Santa Barbara
Abstract

William Hamilton developed the biological theory of kin selection before game theory became familiar to biologists. Thus he implicitly confined his analysis to a rather special subclass of games, with linear structure. This paper shows that while Hamilton's rule does not apply to a more general class of games, there is a useful generalization that does apply. This paper also generalizes results in my 1995 AER paper on sibling interaction from symmetric two-player games to multiplayer games that may be asymmetric.

Keywords
  • evolutionary game theory,
  • kin selection,
  • Hamilton's rule,
  • economics of family
Disciplines
Publication Date
March 1, 2000
Citation Information
Ted Bergstrom. "Evolution of Behavior in Family Games" Department of Economics, UCSB (2000)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/ted_bergstrom/58/