Evolutionary Dynamical Pattern of 'Coyness and Philandering' : Evidence from Experimental Economics

Background: The “Coyness and Philandering” game here is original suggested as “sex war game” by Dawkins (1976), which is a typical model for game theory and evolution dynamic study for decades. However, the game has not been detected in experimental economics method. Even though experimental economics has been employed for evaluating the population dynamic (learning) models by measuring evolution stability state, the equilibrium selection, the evolution paths and the frequency change at a given state (Van Huyck (2008), Bouchez & Friedman (2008), Crawford (1991), Battalio et al. (2001) and Cason et al. (2005)), but ”the data are sparse” (Cheung & Friedman (1998)) and could not evaluate evolutionary dynamics well till now. Experiment: We conduct the 2 × 2 game, of which the payoff matrix is [(2,2),(5,5);(0,0),(15,-5)] (Dawkins (1976)), in experimental economics laboratory. The experiments include 12 independent sessions. Each session involves 16 human subjects split into two populations (roles). Each session consists of 300 rounds of the game repeatedly with a random matching for each round. Total 192 undergraduates students involve in the experiment. Measurement and Result: The mean frequency is (0.604, 0.682). Empirical velocity vector field is exactly a cycle-like pattern and grossly can be captured by evolutionary population dynamics models well. Summary: Our measurement improve the metric (Battalio et al. (2001)) by excluding detailed balance condition processes (Young (2008)). We provide first clearly empirical dynamic pattern of the “Coyness and Philandering” game in experimental economics. We suggest that, the empirical velocity field measurement could be a helpful judgement not only for comparisons of the existed dynamics models, but also for future theoretical models building