Defended my PhD Thesis - Evolutionary game theoretic modeling of decision making and culture

I defended my PhD thesis! :D

This work focused on employing evolutionary game theoretic approaches that combine theoretical analysis and multi-agent systems to generate models of the evolution of human decision-making and culture. This work has shown how a large range of population dynamics (resembling imitation learning) result in state-dependent risk preferences under sequential choice, and how this principle facilitates the evolution of cooperation in classic game-theoretic games where cooperation entails risk.

The full thesis can be found here: Evolutionary game theoretic modeling of decision making and culture

Here is the abstract:

Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT) has become an attractive framework for modeling human behavior because it provides tools to explicitly model the dynamics of behaviors in populations over time and does not require the strong rationality assumptions of classical game theory. Since the application of EGT to human behavior is still relatively new, many questions about human behavior and culture of interest to social scientists have yet to be examined through an EGT perspective to determine whether explanatory and predictive rather than merely descriptive insights can be gained. In this thesis, informed by social science data and under close collaboration with social scientists, I use EGT-based approaches to model and gain a qualitative understanding of various aspects of the evolution of human decision-making and culture. The specific phenomena I explore are i) risk preferences and their implications on the evolution of cooperation and ii) the relationship between societal threat and the propensity with which agents of societies punish norm-violating behavior.