An Evolutionary Trade Network Game with Preferential Partner Selection

An evolutionary trade network game (TNG) is proposed for studying the interplay between evolutionary game dynamics and preferential partner selection in various market contexts with distributed adaptive agents. The modu lar form of the TNG facilitates experimenta tion with alternative specifications for trade p^tner matching, trading, expectation updat ing, and trade strategy evolution. Experimental results obtained using a C-t-f implementation suggest that the conventional optimality prop erties used to evaluate agent matching mecha nisms in static market contexts may be inad equate measures of optimality from an evolu tionary perspective.