We report results from an experiment that examines play in an indefinitely repeated, 2-player Prisoner’s Dilemma game. Each experimental session involves N subjects and a sequence of indefinitely repeated games. The main treatment consists of whether agents are matched in fixed pairings or matched randomly in each indefinitely repeated game. Within the random matching treatment, we vary the inf...

The results of simulating a prisoner’s dilemma round-robin tournament are presented. In the tournament, each participating strategy played an iterated prisoner’s dilemma against each of the other strategies (roundrobin) and as a variant also against itself. The participants of a tournament are all deterministic strategies and have the same memory size regarding their own and their opponent’s pa...

In a world torn by conflict, how can mutually beneficial cooperation can emerge spontaneously, with no higher authority than the rule of the jungle? History, economics, and especially biology provide many real-world examples of mutual cooperation without any enforcement from a higher authority. This cooperation occurs despite a bloodthirsty option offering more payoff to those might exploit the...

We study incentives for information sharing among agricultural intermediaries in imperfectly competitive markets for farm output. Information sharing always increases expected grower and total surplus, but may reduce expected intermediary profits. Even when expected profits increase with information sharing, intermediary firms face a Prisoner’s Dilemma where it is privately rational to withhold...

We test a two-stage compensation mechanism for promoting cooperation in Prisoner’s Dilemma games. Players first simultaneously choose binding non-negative amounts to pay their counterparts for cooperating, and then play the induced game knowing these amounts. In our games, all payment pairs consistent with mutual cooperation in subgame-perfect equilibrium transform these games into coordination...

Kritikos and Bolle’s approach is still flawed, but a viable indenture game can still readily be structured within the context of iterated prisoner’s dilemma. © 2000 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. JEL classification: C70

Current theories of social evolution predict the direction of selection for a given level of assortment. What remains unclear is how to determine the direction of selection on assortment itself if this were subject to evolutionary change. Here we define and analyse a simple model that allows us to investigate the evolution of assortment. We find that there is only a positive selection gradient ...

Cooperation among children can appear haphazard, a finding often attributed to deficient social skills and moral reasoning. Here we took a game theoretical approach to understand development of cooperation, using the prisoner’s dilemma to test an alternative source of age-differences in cooperative behavior—how children and adults represent the numerical magnitudes of payoffs for cooperating ve...

Recent studies suggest that payoffs in cents, compared to dollars, produce less defection in a repeated prisoner’s dilemma game. We are unable to replicate these findings with conventional economic procedures or in a direct replication. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.