’ s repository of research publications and other research outputs Time and the Prisoner

Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online's data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. Abstract This paper examines the integration of computational complexity into game theoretic models. The example focused on is the Prisoner's Dilemma, repeated for a nite length of time. We show that a minimal bound on the players' computational ability is suucient to enable cooperative behavior. In addition, a variant of the repeated Prisoner's Dilemma game is suggested, in which players have the choice of opting out. This modiication enriches the game and suggests dominance of cooperative strategies. Competitive analysis is suggested as a tool for investigating sub-optimal (but computationally tractable) strategies and game theoretic models in general. Using competitive analysis, it is shown that for bounded players, a sub-optimal strategy might be the optimal choice, given resource limitations.