| In studying interactions among multiple agents or strategies, the equilibrium predictions almost always depend on the specific modeling details. For instance, in a model of public good provision, the different equilibria the models predict are contingent on choice of functional forms. Though choosing specific functional forms can aid intuition and give useful insights about the underlying social or economic phenomenon, realistically arguing, we cannot capture the richness of the social or economic interactions with any specific functional form. The only time we can "reliably" use a specific functional form is when we have fairly precise information about the variables and interactions leading to a particular phenomenon. Such precise information is rarely available in the social sciences.; To overcome the problem of functional form dependence of equilibrium predictions, we employ a newly developed Qualitative Evolutionary Game Theoretic Approach (Saari, 2002) to give its results that are robust to any choice of functional specification. A basic assumption invoked while using the qualitative evolutionary gauze theoretic (QEGT) approach is the continuity in the underlying population or strategy adjustment, dynamics. The QEGT approach can potentially give us all possible models of agent interactions, if we specify the near-equilibrium behavior.; In the thesis we examine models of public good provision, models of predator-entrepreneur interaction and show how the QEGT approach allows us to go beyond the existing game theoretic and quantitative evolutionary game theoretic approaches, in terms of predicting all tire existing and many new plausible equilibria. |
