Prisoner’s dilemma

• TEMPTATION>REWARD>PUNISHMENT>SUCKER
Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma
• Consider a prisoner’s dilemma game played many times
• A strategy specifies what you do in each stage game
• Ex: cooperate in every stage game
• Ex: cooperate in every odd-numbered stage game, defect in every
even-numbered stage game
• Etc…
Axelrod’s tournament
Axelrod’s tournament
• The game above repeated 200 times
• 15 strategies submitted
• Random strategy
• Always defect
• Always cooperate
• Etc.
• Each strategy played against all other strategies including itself
• 15x15=225 games in total
• After all games played, earnings added and strategy with the most
points declared winner
Tournament results
• On average, no strategy scored above 600 points per game (what you
would get if everyone mutually cooperated 200 rounds)
• The best scoring strategies were nice (never first to defect)
• 8 top scoring strategies were nice
• The worst scoring strategies were nasty (first to defect)
• Forgiving strategies did better than unforgiving ones
• A forgiving strategy has a short memory. For example, it doesn’t punish
forever
• Of the 8 nice strategies, one of the strategies punished a defection by
defecting forever in response. This was the worst scoring nice strategy
Tit-for-tat
• The winning strategy was called tit-for-tat
• This strategy starts off by cooperating and then mimics what the other
player does
• Example: imagine tit-for-tat playing against naïve prober
• Naïve prober is the same as tit for tat, except it defects 1 in 10 rounds chosen at
random
• U(TFT,TFT)>U(NP,TFT) >U(NP,NP)
• Example: imagine tit-for-tat playing against remorseful prober
• Remorseful prober is the same as naïve prober but allows “one free hit”
• U(TFT,TFT)>U(RP,TFT)>U(NP,TFT)
• But is tit-for-tat an equilibrium?
Tit-for-two-tats
• Same at Tit-for-tat but allows two defections in a row
• Axelrod found that if tit-for-two-tats participated in his tournament, it
would have won
Second tournament
• More strategies (63)
• John Maynard Smith submitted tit-for-two-tats
• Random termination times for each game (“infinitely” repeated
game)
• Tit-for-tat won again!

• One problem with these tournaments is that the winner depends on

the strategies that were submitted
Third tournament (Evolution)
• Started with the same 63 strategies in equal proportion
• After the first round of repeated games was played, winnings paid out in
“offspring”
• New round with different proportions of strategies
• After 1000 rounds, no changes in the population
• Nasty strategies driven out, tit-for-tat and some other nice strategies
survived
• Note tit-for-tat is not ESS
• Can be invaded by always cooperate
• Can be invaded by a mixture of tit-for-two-tats and suspicious tit-for-tat
(who defects on the first move, otherwise behaves like tit-for-tat)
Collectively stable strategies
• If there are lots of nasty strategies, always defect does best
• If there are lots of nice strategies, tit-for-tat does best
• Consider a world where only these two strategies are played
• Can we argue that the system will tend toward tit-for-tat?
• Kinship: related individuals live close together
• Small clusters grow into large clusters
Examples of repeated games
• “Live and let live” in WWI
• Vampire bats