Choosing Opponents in Prisoners' Dilemma: An Evolutionary Analysis

Peter Engseld () and Andreas Bergh ()

No 2005:45, Working Papers from Lund University, Department of Economics

Abstract: We analyze a cooperation game in an evolutionary environment. Agents make noisy observations of opponents’ propensity to cooperate, called reputation, and form preferences over opponents based on their reputation. A game takes place when two agents agree to play. Pareto optimal cooperation is evolutionarily stable when reputation perfectly reflects propensity to cooperate. With some reputation noise, there will be at least some cooperation. Individual concern for reputation results in a seemingly altruistic behavior. The degree of cooperation is decreasing in anonymity. If reputation is noisy enough, there is no cooperation in equilibrium.

Keywords: Cooperation; Conditioned Strategies; Prisoners Dilemma; Signaling; Reputation; Altruism; Evolutionary Equilibrium (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C70 C72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo and nep-gth
Date: 2005-11-29
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nek.lu.se/publications/workpap/Papers/WP05_45.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:lunewp:2005_045

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Lund University, Department of Economics
Address: Department of Economics, School of Economics and Management, Lund University, Box 7082, S-220 07 Lund,Sweden
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by David Edgerton ().