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What You Gotta Know to Play Good in the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma

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  • Ethan Akin

    (Mathematics Department, The City College, 137 Street and Convent Avenue, New York City, NY 10031, USA)

Abstract

For the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma there exist good strategies which solve the problem when we restrict attention to the long term average payoff. When used by both players, these assure the cooperative payoff for each of them. Neither player can benefit by moving unilaterally to any other strategy, i.e., these provide Nash equilibria. In addition, if a player uses instead an alternative which decreases the opponent’s payoff below the cooperative level, then his own payoff is decreased as well. Thus, if we limit attention to the long term payoff, these strategies effectively stabilize cooperative behavior. The existence of such strategies follows from the so-called Folk Theorem for supergames, and the proof constructs an explicit memory-one example, which has been labeled Grim. Here we describe all the memory-one good strategies for the non-symmetric version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. This is the natural object of study when the payoffs are in units of the separate players’ utilities. We discuss the special advantages and problems associated with some specific good strategies.

Suggested Citation

  • Ethan Akin, 2015. "What You Gotta Know to Play Good in the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma," Games, MDPI, vol. 6(3), pages 1-16, June.
  • Handle: RePEc:gam:jgames:v:6:y:2015:i:3:p:175-190:d:51708
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. James W. Friedman, 1971. "A Non-cooperative Equilibrium for Supergames," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 38(1), pages 1-12.
    2. M.C. Boerlijst & M.A. Nowak & K. Sigmund, 1997. "Equal Pay for all Prisoners/ The Logic of Contrition," Working Papers ir97073, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
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    Cited by:

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    2. Masahiko Ueda & Toshiyuki Tanaka, 2020. "Linear algebraic structure of zero-determinant strategies in repeated games," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(4), pages 1-13, April.
    3. McAvoy, Alex & Hauert, Christoph, 2017. "Autocratic strategies for alternating games," Theoretical Population Biology, Elsevier, vol. 113(C), pages 13-22.
    4. Molnar, Grant & Hammond, Caroline & Fu, Feng, 2023. "Reactive means in the iterated Prisoner’s dilemma," Applied Mathematics and Computation, Elsevier, vol. 458(C).
    5. Kang, Kai & Tian, Jinyan & Zhang, Boyu, 2024. "Cooperation and control in asymmetric repeated games," Applied Mathematics and Computation, Elsevier, vol. 470(C).
    6. Peter S. Park & Martin A. Nowak & Christian Hilbe, 2022. "Cooperation in alternating interactions with memory constraints," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 13(1), pages 1-11, December.
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    8. Yohsuke Murase & Seung Ki Baek, 2021. "Friendly-rivalry solution to the iterated n-person public-goods game," PLOS Computational Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 17(1), pages 1-17, January.

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