Extortion can outperform generosity in the iterated prisoner's dilemma

From extortion to generosity, evolution in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma.

Recent work has revealed a new class of "zero-determinant" (ZD) strategies for iterated, two-player games. ZD strategies allow a player to unilaterally enforce a linear relationship between her score and her opponent's score, and thus to achieve an unusual degree of control over both players' long-term payoffs. Although originally conceived in the context of classical two-player game theory, ZD...

Extortion subdues human players but is finally punished in the prisoner’s dilemma

Extortion is the practice of obtaining advantages through explicit forces and threats. Recently, it was demonstrated that even the repeated prisoner's dilemma, one of the key models to explain mutual cooperation, allows for implicit forms of extortion. According to the theory, extortioners demand and receive an excessive share of any surplus, which allows them to outperform any adapting co-play...

The Evolution of Extortion in Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Games

Adaptive Dynamics of Extortion and Compliance

Direct reciprocity is a mechanism for the evolution of cooperation. For the iterated prisoner's dilemma, a new class of strategies has recently been described, the so-called zero-determinant strategies. Using such a strategy, a player can unilaterally enforce a linear relationship between his own payoff and the co-player's payoff. In particular the player may act in such a way that it becomes o...

Evolution of extortion in structured populations

Extortion strategies can dominate any opponent in an iterated prisoner's dilemma game. But if players are able to adopt the strategies performing better, extortion becomes widespread and evolutionary unstable. It may sometimes act as a catalyst for the evolution of cooperation, and it can also emerge in interactions between two populations, yet it is not the evolutionarily stable outcome. Here ...