The Evolution of Cooperation: The Role of Costly Strategy Adjustments

Yaroslav Rosokha and Julian Romero

Purdue University Economics Working Papers from Purdue University, Department of Economics

Abstract: We study the evolution of cooperation in the indenitely repeated prisoner's dilemma when it is costly for players to adjust their strategy. Our experimental interface allows subjects to design a comprehensive strategy that then selects actions for them in every period. We conduct lab experiments in which subjects can adjust their strategies during a repeated game but may incur a cost for doing so. We find three main results. First, subjects learn to cooperate more when adjustments are costless than when they are costly. Second, subjects make more adjustments to their strategies when adjustments are costless, but they still make adjustments even when they are costly. Finally, we find that cooperative strategies emerge over time when adjustments are costless but not when adjustments are costly. These results highlight that within-game experimentation and learning are critical to the rise of cooperative behavior. We provide simulations based on an evolutionary algorithm to support these results.

Keywords: Indenitely Repeated Games; Prisoner's Dilemma; Experiments; Co-operation; Strategies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2017-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-hpe
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://business.purdue.edu/research/working-paper ... erationWithCosts.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Evolution of Cooperation: The Role of Costly Strategy Adjustments (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pur:prukra:1300

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Purdue University Economics Working Papers from Purdue University, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Business PHD ().