A behavioural foundation for models of evolutionary drift

Binmore and Samuelson [Binmore, K., Samuelson, L., 1999. Evolutionary drift and equilibrium selection. Review of Economic Studies 66, 363–393] have shown that perturbations (drift) are crucial to study the stability properties of Nash equilibria. We contribute to this literature by providing a behavioural foundation for models of evolutionary drift based on the similarity theory introduced by Tversky [Tversky, A., 1977. Features of similarity. Psychological Review 84, 327–352]. The innovation is that we derive the similarity relations from the perception that each agent has about how well he is playing the game. We obtain different models of drift depending on how we model that perception and show the conditions for each model to stabilize elements in components of Nash equilibria that are not subgame-perfect.