We report experimental results for a twice-played prisoners’ dilemma in which the players can choose the allocation of the stakes across the two periods. Our point of departure is the assumption that some (but not all) people are principled to “do the right thing,” or cooperate, as long as their opponent is sufficiently likely to do so. The presence of such types can be exploited to enhance coo...

We apply the Cross-entropy method to the N persons Iterated Prisoners Dilemma and show that cooperation is more readily achieved than with existing methods such as genetic algorithms or reinforcement learning.

Mentalising is assumed to be involved in decision-making that is necessary to social interaction. We investigated the relationship between mentalising and three types of strategic games – Prisoners’ Dilemma, Dictator and Ultimatum – in children with and without autistic spectrum disorders. Overall, the results revealed less dramatic diVerences than expected among the normally developing age gro...

This article introduces a model of rationality that combines procedural utility over actions with consequential utility over payo¤s. It applies the model to the Prisoners’ Dilemma and shows that empirically observed cooperative behaviors can be rationally explained by a procedural utility for cooperation. The model characterizes the situations in which cooperation emerges as a Nash equilibrium....

Many studies of experimental economics have produced outcomes which contradict the predictions of Nash equilibrium, which relies heavily upon the premise of selfishness of an individual. In the games involving contexts of social conflicts represented by the prisoners’ dilemma game, the experiments yields outcomes quite different from what are predicted by the conventional wisdom. In order to fi...

Compte and Postlewaite (2008, 2012) set out a model that assumed that peoples’ behavior was organized via mental systems, and employed that framework to analyze how people might cooperate in a repeated relationship with private monitoring with plausible strategies. That paper focussed on the case in which two people played a repeated prisoners dilemma game. In this paper we show that the basic ...

It has been a long-lasting pursuit to promote cooperation, and this study aims to promote cooperation via the combination of social stratification and the spatial prisoners' dilemma game. It is previously assumed that agents share the identical payoff matrix, but the stratification or diversity exists and exerts influences in real societies. Thus, two additional classes, elites and scoundrels, ...