The Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (IPD) is a deceptively simple game that has sparked a lot of research in many different fields. However, despite all of this attention, the IPD’s lessons are still, surprisingly, widely misunderstood.
Over the next few weeks I plan to post an eight-part series that will hopefully be helpful in bringing interested readers up-to-speed with the latest thinking about this important and fascinating game.
Here are the parts I am planning. I will add links as I add posts.
Tit-for-Tat. It ain’t all that.
Part 1: The Prisoner’s Dilemma, except repeated.
Part 2: When Tit-for-Tat was all that.
Part 3: The population is important.
Part 4: When everything was all that.
Part 5: When nothing was all that (for long).
Part 6: Whither uncertainty?
Part 7: Selecting this from that.
Part 8: Learning to play the game.
Coordination problems like this are great fun. I hope you include Tony Ord’s Further results on the societal iterated prisoner’s dilemma. http://amirrorclear.net/academic/ideas/dilemma/index.html
Anders, I looked through the post at the link you sent. I like the set-up of the game. It seems to combine aspects of the iterated game described above and aspects of punishment models. I also think it tells a similar story – which is good because we hope that the lessons of these simple models would be robust to many different formulations – or else, what’s the point?