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The article discusses the use of game theory to preserve family harmony over the holidays. Topics covered include the use of a Borda count to determine who will host the party, the use of framing to radically alter human behaviour, and the use of the I Cut, You Pick technique to peaceably allocate food.

Recent work on costly signaling games has identified new Nash equilibria in addition to the standard costly signaling equilibrium as a possible explanation for signaling behavior. These so-called hybrid equilibria are Liapunov stable, but not asymptotically stable for the replicator dynamics. Since some eigenvalues of the hybrid equilibria have zero real part, this result is not structurally stable. The purpose of this paper is to show that under one reasonable perturbation of the replicator dynamics—the selection–mutation dynamics—rest points close to the hybrid equilibrium exist and are asymptotically stable. Moreover, for another plausible version of the replicator dynamics—Maynard Smith’s adjusted replicator dynamics—the same is true. This reinforces the significance of hybrid equilibria for signaling.

The article focuses on the use of game theory concepts to promote cooperation among children. Topics discussed include an overview of the study conducted by psychologists Elizabeth S. Spelke from the University of Washington which investigates children's perception of cooperation, a brief description of the concept of tit-for-tat and its application on children, and the impact of spite behavior among cooperative children.

Lewis signalling games illustrate how language might evolve from random behaviour. The probability of evolving an optimal signalling language is, in part, a function of what learning strategy the agents use. Here we investigate three learning strategies, each of which allows agents to forget old experience. In each case, we find that forgetting increases the probability of evolving an optimal language. It does this by making it less likely that past partial success will continue to reinforce suboptimal practice. The learning strategies considered here show how forgetting past experience can promote learning in the context of games with suboptimal equilibria.