Traditionally, the most common game-theoretic model of the Soviet-US nuclear arms race has been an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. According to such a model, on any given trial both superpowers are better off arming regardless of what the other side chooses, but if both sides arm the outcome is less desirable than had both sides reduced their supply of weapons. Although Soviet and US preferences r...

The class of consistently competitive games canonically unifies Prisoner’s Dilemmas, contests, auctions, and Bertrand competitions. If those games are repeated infinitely, the players have to negotiate about the strategies that are to be repeated infinitely. These negotiations, however, are perturbed by the possibility that players make defective proposals (defective proposals are sensibly not ...

We propose an epistemic theory of micro-economic interactions, termed Economic Harmony. In the theory, we modify the standard utility, by changing its argument from the player’s actual payoff, to the ratio between the player’s actual payoff and his or her aspired payoff. We show that the aforementioned minor epistemic modification of the concept of utility is quite powerful in generating plausi...

The interactionist approach to the study of exogenous oxytocin effects on prosocial behavior has emphasized the need to consider both contextual cues and individual differences. Therefore, an experiment was set up to examine the joint effect of intranasal oxytocin, a salient social cue, and the personality trait social value orientation on cooperative behavior in one-shot prisoner’s dilemma gam...

An important question for teachers and developers of instructional software is how much guidance or assistance should be provided to help students learn. This question has been framed within the field of educational technology as the ‘assistance dilemma’ and has been the subject of a variety of studies. In the study reported in this paper, we explore the learning benefits of four types of compu...

We study a class of multi-level collective actions in which each individual is simultaneously engaged in an intragroup conflict and intergroup competition. The intragroup conflict is modeled as an n-person Prisoner’s Dilemma game in which the dominant strategy is to contribute nothing. The intergroup competition is for an exogenous and commonly known prize shared by members of the winning group...

We hypothesize that sharing a birthday is sucient to create a unit relationship. Two studies demonstrated that individuals cooperated more in a prisoners dilemma game when their (®ctitious) opponent shared their birthday. They also reacted more negatively to betrayal and were less sensitive to relative gains for self versus other. # 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Tags and other characteristic, externally perceptible features that are consistent among groups of animals or humans can be used by others to determine appropriate response strategies in societies. This usage of tags can be extended to artificial environments, where agents can significantly reduce cognitive effort spent on appropriate strategy choice and behavior selection by reusing strategies...

We examine the influence of asynchronism in the Spatial Prisoner’s Dilemma game. Previous studies reported that less cooperation is achieved with the asynchronous version of the game than with the synchronous one. Here, we show that, in general, the opposite is the most common outcome. This conclusion is only possible because a larger number of scenarios was tested, namely, different interactio...

This paper extends the literature on individual versus group decision-making by combining a strategic inter-group game with an intra-group voting mechanism. The intergroup game is a simple Prisoners’ Dilemma, while we consider two versions of an intragroup voting mechanism—a form of representative democracy and a majority vote. Our results suggest that players tend to be more cooperative in the...