Mimicking the winner leads to war: An evolutionary analysis of conflict and cooperation

This note applies an evolutionary analysis to Skaperdas's (1992) static model of conflict and cooperation, in which agents are faced with trade-offs between joint production and share competition. We adopt the stochastic evolution approach, and assume that each agent occasionally mimics the action of the winner of the stage. In contrast to Skaperdas's results that justify full or partial cooperation in productive activity, the long-run equilibrium must exhibit total conflict; nobody engages in production at all.