A Continuous Dilemma ∗

Daniel Friedman and Ryan Oprea

Santa Cruz Department of Economics, Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC Santa Cruz

Abstract: We study prisoner’s dilemmas played in continuous time with flow payoffs over 60 seconds. In most cases, the median rate of mutual cooperation rises to 90% or more. Control sessions with 8-time repeated matchings achieve less than half as much cooperation, and cooperation rates approach zero in one-shot control sessions. In follow-up sessions with a variable number of subperiods, cooperation rates increase nearly linearly as the grid size decreases and, with one-second subperiods, they approach the level seen in continuous sessions. Our data support a strand of theory that explains how the capacity to respond rapidly stabilizes cooperation and destabilizes defection in the prisoner’s dilemma.

Keywords: Prisoner’s dilemma; game theory; laboratory experiment; continuous time game. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-09-10
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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