Evidence of homo economicus? Findings from experiment on evolutionary prisoners' dilemma game

Rimawan Pradiptyo, Banoon Sasmitasiwi and Gumilang Aryo Sahadewo

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper aims to analyze subjects’ behavior in an experiment on evolutionary process of prisoners’ dilemma game. The experiment has been designed by using sixteen one-shot prisoners’ dilemma games with payoffs perturbation and random matching players under perfect information. The subjects of the experiment were students and staff in Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia. In contrast to previous studies, for instance Selten and Stoecker’s (1986) Cooper’s, et.al (1991, 1996), the majority of the subjects in this experiment tend to choose Nash equilibrium strategy consistently from the first game. The result showed that the proportion of the Nash equilibrium outcome was consistently in the range of 85%-88%, whereas the tacit cooperation or Pareto optimum outcome was about 1%-2%. There were evidence that payoffs perturbation influences players’ decision. In contrast to the previous studies above, the results from this study revealed that the vast majority of the subjects tend to choose the dominant strategy as prescribed in Game Theory.

Keywords: Prisoners' dilemma; experiment; random-matching players; payoffs perturbation; framing effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C73 C92 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-02-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-neu
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