Evolutionary Prediction Games

When users decide whether to use a system based on the quality of predictions they receive, learning has the capacity to shape the population of users it serves - for better or worse. This work aims to study the long-term implications of this process through the lens of evolutionary game theory. We introduce and study evolutionary prediction games, designed to capture the role of learning as a driver of natural selection between groups of users, and hence a determinant of evolutionary outcomes. Our main theoretical results show that: (i) in settings with unlimited data and compute, learning tends to reinforce the survival of the fittest, and (ii) in more realistic settings, opportunities for coexistence emerge. We analyze these opportunities in terms of their stability and feasibility, present several mechanisms that can sustain their existence, and empirically demonstrate our findings using real and synthetic data.