Evolutionary dynamics in bilingual games

Abstract

In two-strategy coordination games with distinct payoff- and risk-dominant equilibria, existing results show that the inefficient risk-dominant equilibrium is uniquely selected under many evolutionary dynamics. In the above class of coordination games, we study the effect of introducing a bilingual strategy that is compatible with both of the existing strategies. An agent playing the bilingual strategy incurs an additional adoption cost but never miscoordinates with any other agent. We show that if the adoption cost of the bilingual strategy is low, then the efficient payoff-dominant equilibrium can be uniquely selected under many evolutionary dynamics.