The expected prisoner’s dilemma – With rationally arising cooperation

Richard J Arend

PLOS ONE, 2020, vol. 15, issue 9, 1-6

Abstract: Currently, there is no satisfying answer to how cooperation arises rationally in a single-play prisoner’s dilemma game with complete information. When player types are known, as well as payoffs and actions, economic analysis through payoff-optimizing computation does not provide a clear path for cooperation. We propose a new form of game–the ‘expected’ game–and illustrate its implications for theory and practice based on the prisoner’s dilemma example. We prove that cooperation can be a rational choice for players in reality in such games defined by a weighted set of payoffs of two or more different reference games.

Date: 2020
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0239299

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0239299

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