RATIONALITY AND STABILITY IN THE THEORY OF MOVES

Edwin Woerdman

Rationality and Society, 2000, vol. 12, issue 1, 67-86

Abstract: According to Brams' Theory of Moves (TOM), mutual cooperation will emerge in the Prisoner's Dilemma Game (PDG) from all initial states (except initial state (2,2)). Contrary to this result, only applying the rules of TOM to the PDG (including the precedence norm) yields mutual defection from all initial states (except initial state (3,3)). It appears that TOM achieves the cooperative outcomes by introducing a concept of voluntary cooperation (magnanimity) and an interpretation of self-interest (the Two-Sidedness Convention), which are both based on collective rationality. Specifically, these elements of TOM ignore the conflict between individual and collective rationality, which characterizes the dilemma of the PDG. In addition, the PDG in TOM is not internally stable in the case of uncertainty with regard to the starting point of the game.

Keywords: Prisoner's Dilemma game; rationality; stability; theory of moves; voluntary cooperation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/104346300012001004 (text/html)

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ratsoc:v:12:y:2000:i:1:p:67-86

DOI: 10.1177/104346300012001004

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Rationality and Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().