The Prisoners' (Plea Bargain) Dilemma

The Prisoners' Dilemma Revisited

Cooperation has always been recognised as a fundamental ingredient in the creation of societies and the generation of wealth. As a concept, it has been studied for many years. Yet, in practice, its emergence and persistence are less understood. In the following a game theoretic approach to the study of cooperation based on the Prisoners' Dilemma is reviewed. Using a Genetic Algorithm, strategie...

Fairness and the Willingness to Accept Plea Bargain Offers

Prisoners' other Dilemma

We ...nd that cooperation as equilibrium of the in...nitely repeated discounted Prisoner’s Dilemma is often not plausible: For a signi...cant subset of the payo¤discount factor parameter space, all co-operation equilibria are strictly risk dominated (in the sense of Harsanyi and Selten, 1988) by defection. We derive an easy-to-calculate critical level for the discount factor ±¤ below which this...

Foundations for Cooperation in the Prisoners ’ Dilemma

We provide axiomatic foundations for a simple model of play in prisoners’ dilemma games. The model accommodates cooperation and suggests that players behave as if their expectations about their opponents’ behavior vary with their own choice. We refer to this nonstandard updating as magical thinking. The degree to which players exhibit magical thinking may be heterogeneous in the population and ...

Contingent social utility in the prisoners’ dilemma

We examined a central assumption of recent theories: that social utility is contingent on impressions of other people. We manipulated participants’ impression of the other player in a prisoners’ dilemma. We then measured participants’ own preferences in the PD, their estimates of the other player’s preferences in the PD, their prediction of the other player’s move, and their own move. We hypoth...