Leo Durocher, a famous baseball player from the 1930s, once said that “Nice guys finish last.” That may be true in baseball, but it is not true in life more generally. In this article, we use ideas from the branch of mathematics known as “game theory” to study a situation known as the “Prisoners’ Dilemma (PD),” which sheds light on why people often fail to work well together. Game theory shows ...

We consider the Moran process with two populations competing under an iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma in the presence of mutation, and concentrate on the case where there are multiple Evolutionarily Stable Strategies. We perform a complete bifurcation analysis of the deterministic system which arises in the infinite population size. We also study the Master equation and obtain asymptotics for the i...

This paper examines a two-period duopoly where consumers are lockedin by switching costs that they face in the second period. The paper’s main focus is on the question of how the consumer lock-in affects the firms’ choice of product durability. We show that firms may face a prisoners’ dilemma situation in that they simultaneously choose nondurable products although they would have higher profit...

The theoretical description of the evolution of cooperation presented by Bergstrom based on assortative matching with partner choice allows to model the population dynamics in a game of Nonrepetitive Prisoners Dilemma. In this paper we present a short analysis of asymmetric effects brought into the game by self knowledge of the participants, that is the knowledge of one's own strategy. Within t...

We study a setting where imitative players are matched into pairs to play a Prisoners’ Dilemma game. A well known result in such setting is that under random matching cooperation vanishes for any interior initial condition. The novelty of this paper is that we consider partial rematching: players that belong to a pair where both parties cooperate repeat partner next period whilst all other play...

We use the formalism of Clifford Geometric Algebra (GA) to develop an analysis of quantum versions of three-player non-cooperative games. The quantum games we explore are played in an Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) type setting. In this setting, the players' strategy sets remain identical to the ones in the mixed-strategy version of the classical game that is obtained as a proper subset of the c...

We study infinitely repeated symmetric 2×2 games played by bounded rational agents who follow a simple rule of thumb: each agent continues to play the same action if the current payoff exceeds the average of the past payoffs, and switches to the other action with a positive probability otherwise. By applying the stochastic approximation technique, we characterize the asymptotic outcomes for all...

This supplement contains extended formal results for Daley and Sadowski (2015) (henceforth DS15). Specifically, §S.1 establishes that in Prisoners’ Dilemma (PD) games, the model of DS15 is logically distinct from three models that employ well-known forms of other-regarding preferences: altruism (Ledyard, 1995; Levine, 1998), inequity aversion (Fehr and Schmidt, 1999), and reciprocity (Rabin, 19...

A common observation in the informal literature of economics (and elsewhere) is that in multistage “games,” players may seek early in the game to acquire a reputation for being “tough” or “benevolent” or something else. But this phenomenon is not observed in some formal game-theoretic analyses of finite games, such as Selten’s finitely repeated chain-store game or in the finitely repeated priso...

This paper presents a model that incorporates product market competition into the standard neoclassical framework. The model explains why value-maximizing firms conduct mergers that appear to lower shareholder value. In a Cournot setting, the model demonstrates a prisoners’ dilemma for merging firms in a merger wave. Consistent with the model’s implications, the paper empirically documents that...