Evolutionary Stable Strategies in Multistage Games

Direct ESS has some disadvantages, which are seen even in the case of repeated games when the sequence of stage ESSs may not constitute the direct ESS in the repeated game. We present here the refinement of the ESS definition, which eliminates these disadvantages and represents the base for the definition of ESS in games in extensive form. The effectiveness of this approach for multistage n-person games is shown for metagame (this notion is used for the first time), in which under some relevant conditions, the existence of ESS is proved, and ESSs are constructed using threat strategies.