Strategy Choice in the Infinitely Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma

By P. D. Bo, Guillaume R. Fréchette. The American Economic Review, 2019

123 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use a novel experimental design to reliably elicit subjects’ strategies in an infinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma experiment with perfect monitoring. We find that three simple strategies repre‑ sent the majority of the chosen strategies: Always Defect, Tit‑for‑Tat, and Grim. In addition, we identify how the strategies systematically vary with the parameters of the game. Finally, we use the elicited strategies to test the ability to recover strategies using statistical methods based on observed round‑by‑round cooperation choices and find that this can be done fairly well, but only under certain conditions. (JEL C72, C73, C92)

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/805983c751c39b8d75fe86f62b84fd694b4e200c