Episodic Learning : Towards the Emergences of Partial Cooperation

We introduce and apply a new learning mechanism, episodic learning. This learning paradigm is shown to be tightly linked to a natural form of reinforcement learning. Surprisingly, though the defect action in the ‘Prisoners’ Dilemma’ setting is a dominant strategy (and the only evolutionary stable strategy), when using episodic learning partial cooperation is obtained, which is stable against invasion of individuals with defection as their most frequent action. We further show the emergence of partial cooperation (‘altruism’), in the context of the ‘Centipede’ game. Our results are consistent with the experimental data about partial cooperation obtained by cognitive psychologists. Copyright © 2003 S. Karger AG, Basel