A long-standing question in biology and economics is whether individual organisms evolve to behave as if they were striving to maximize some goal function. We here formalize the \as if" question in a patch-structured population in which individuals obtain material payoffs from (perhaps very...

What preferences will prevail in a society of rational individuals when preference evolution is driven by their success in terms of resulting payoffs? We show that when individuals’ preferences are their private information, a convex combinations of selfishness and morality stand out as...

We provide a generalized definition of evolutionary stability of heritable types in arbitrarily large symmetric interactions under random matching that may be assortative. We establish stability results when these types are strategies in games, and when they are preferences or moral values in...