Signaling and tacit collusion in an infinitely repeated Prisoners’ Dilemma

Joseph E. Harrington and Wei Zhao

Mathematical Social Sciences, 2012, vol. 64, issue 3, 277-289

Abstract: In the context of an infinitely repeated Prisoners’ Dilemma, we explore how cooperation is initiated when players signal and coordinate through their actions. There are two types of players–patient and impatient–and a player’s type is private information. An impatient type is incapable of cooperative play, while if both players are patient types–and this is common knowledge–then they can cooperate with a grim trigger strategy. We find that the longer that players have gone without cooperating, the lower is the probability that they will cooperate in the next period. While the probability of cooperation emerging is always positive, there is a positive probability that cooperation never occurs.

Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165489612000546
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:matsoc:v:64:y:2012:i:3:p:277-289

DOI: 10.1016/j.mathsocsci.2012.05.005

Access Statistics for this article

Mathematical Social Sciences is currently edited by J.-F. Laslier

More articles in Mathematical Social Sciences from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().