Public and Private Partner Selection in Battle of Sexes

Abstract

In this paper the authors investigate what factors can promote population diversity. They compare different partner selection models and strategy mobility on the Battle of Sexes game. This is a game with a coordination dilemma where players must decide which event to attend given that each one has its preferred event but they prefer going together. They investigate two types of partner selection: one based in private information and another based on public information, which is based on an opinion model. The authors analyze two variants of the opinion model. Experimental analysis shows that partner selection plays a minor role of favoring population diversity. One of the most important factors is strategy mobility either implicitly through mutation or explicitly when an offspring is placed in a different location.