  This tutorial article puts forth a framework to analyze the noncooperative
strategic interactions among the members of a large population of bounded
rationality agents. Our approach hinges on, unifies and generalizes existing
methods and models predicated in evolutionary and population games. It does so
by adopting a system-theoretic formalism that is well-suited for a broad
engineering audience familiar with the basic tenets of nonlinear dynamical
systems, Lyapunov stability, storage functions, and passivity. The framework is
pertinent for engineering applications in which a large number of agents have
the authority to select and repeatedly revise their strategies. A mechanism
that is inherent to the problem at hand or is designed and implemented by a
coordinator ascribes a payoff to each possible strategy. Typically, the agents
will prioritize switching to strategies whose payoff is either higher than the
current one or exceeds the population average. The article puts forth a
systematic methodology to characterize the stability of the dynamical system
that results from the feedback interaction between the payoff mechanism and the
revision process. This is important because the set of stable equilibria is an
accurate predictor of the population's long-term behavior. The article includes
rigorous proofs and examples of application of the stability results, which
also extend the state of the art because, unlike previously published work,
they allow for a rather general class of dynamical payoff mechanisms. The new
results and concepts proposed here are thoroughly compared to previous work,
methods and applications of evolutionary and population games.
