Prisoners’ dilemma

The Prisoner dilemma (PD) game is one of the standard protocols used to study cooperative behaviour. However, it only involves the option of either cooperation or deflection which is too simple to account for complex human social interactions. A modified version of the Prisoner Dilemma game called the mixed motive game (MMG) has been developed (Hokanson et al., 1980). It allows more choices in the continuum from cooperation to deflection, including ingratiation, punitive moves without self-gain, cooperation and deflection. Furthermore, differently from the PD, the MMG requires participants to select their options in a sequential rather than in a simultaneous manner. 

If competing stores are located close to each other, this may decrease the search costs for customers and thus increase the need for higher-than-normal service levels. Since any stockouts may well result in loss of the entire shopping basket, it may be optimal to carry higher service levels but at lower profit levels, in other words, a prisoners dilemma outcome, in which all retailers see reduced profits even though they offer higher service levels. 

N. Lacey (2008) The Prisoners Dilemma Political Economy and Punishment in Contemporary Democracies (Cambridge Cambridge University Press). 

As some game theorists such as Robert Axelrod have demonstrated, it is often advantageous for players to cooperate so that both can achieve higher payoffs. In reality, as the prisoners dilemma demonstrates, players who act rationally often achieve an undesirable outcome. 

Improved Decision Making. Because nations and businesses do not act in isolation, they are starting to use game theory to predict the responses of other nations and businesses. These models are complex, but they still follow the same principles found in simple games such as the prisoners dilemma. The development of evolutionary game theory has enabled game... 

Analysis of the game This game setting can be viewed as a prisoners dilemma paradigm which illustrates the conflict between social incentives to cooperate or private incentives to defect (Auman 1987) as shown in Table 1. 

Table 7.4 Prisoners dilemma construction safety knowledge sharing game...

Fig. 7.1 N-persons prisoners dilemma game (Dixit and Skeath 1999)...

Prisoners Dilemma of Construction Safety Knowledge Sharing... 

The evolution of cooperation is frequently analysed in terms of the repeated Prisoner s Dilemma game. Computer simulations show that the emergence of cooperation is a robust phenomenon. However, the strategy which eventually gets adopted in the population seems to depend sensitively on fine details of the modelling process, so that it becomes difficult to predict the evolutionary outcome in real populations. 

One can, of course, adopt the evolutionary viewpoint again. It reduces to drowning by numbers have lots of players play lots of Prisoner s Dilemma games for lots and lots of gen-... 

Thus we ought also to study the iterated Prisoner s Dilemma when the players have to take turns. The slight modification in such an alternating Prisoner s Dilemma game can affect the interaction to a considerable extent. For instance, if two Tit For Tat players engage in a Prisoner s Dilemma of the usual simultaneous kind, and if one of them defects by mistake, both players will subsequently cooperate and defect in turns. On the other hand, if two Tit For Tat players engage in an alternating Prisoner s Dilemma, and a unilateral defection occurs inadvertently, then the outcome will be an unbroken sequence of mutual defections. 

In an interesting series of experiments, Claus Wedekind and Manfred Milinski have tested humans (more specifically, first year students) in both the simultaneous and the alternating Prisoner s Dilemma (see Wedekind and Milinski, 1996). In both cases the sub-... 

Boyd, R. (1989), Mistakes Allow Evolutionary Stability in the Repeated Prisoner s Dilemma Game, Journal of Theoretical Biology 136, 47—56. 

Frean, M.R. (1994), The Prisoner s Dilemma without synchrony, Proceedings of the Royal Society London B, 257, 75-79. 

Nowak, M. and Sigmund, K. (1994), The alternating Prisoner s Dilemma, Journal of Theoretical Biology 168, 219-26. 

Wedekind, C. and Milinski, M. (1996), Human cooperation in the simultaneous and the alternating Prisoner s Dilemma Pavlov versus Generous Tit For Tat. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the USA, 93,2686-2689. 

Wu, J. and R. Axelrod (1995), How to cope with noise in the iterated Prisoner s Dilemma, Journal of Conflict Resolution 39, 183-9. 

Augustus was impatient to witness a transmutation. He ordered his prisoner to send a sample of the Philosopher s Stone to Warsaw as soon as he could. This created a dilemma. Bottger could hardly admit that he didn t know how to make gold. If he did and he was not... 

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