Co-evolution of Optimal Agents for the Alternating Offers Bargaining Game

Bargaining, as an instance of sequential games, is a widely studied problem in game theory, experimental and computational economics. We consider the problem of evolving computational agents with optimal (Subgame Perfect Equilibrium) strategies for the Alternating Offers Bargaining Game. Previous work co-evolving agents for this problem has argued that it is not possible to achieve optimal agents at the end of the co-evolutionary process due to the myopic properties of the evolutionary agents. Emphasising the notion of a co-evolutionary solution concept, we show that this conclusion is mis-leading and present a co-evolutionary algorithm that evolves optimal strategies for the bargaining game with one round. We conclude by explaining why, using previous evaluation procedures and strategy representations, the algorithm is not able to converge to optimal strategies for games with more rounds.