The Prisoner's Dilemma
Time and place
1 PM on Thursday, October 22nd, 2015;
Ethan Akin (CCNY CUNY)
Abstract
For the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, there exist Markov strategies which solve the problem when we restrict attention to the long term average payoff. When used by both players these assure the cooperative payoff for each of them. Neither player can benefit by moving unilaterally any other strategy, i.e. these are Nash equilibria. In addition, if a player uses instead an alternative which decreases the opponent's payoff below the cooperative level, then his own payoff is decreased as well. Thus, if we limit attention to the long term payoff, these "good strategies" effectively stabilize cooperative behavior. We characterize the good strategies and relate them to the recent exciting work of Press and Dyson. The talk should be accessible to advanced undergraduates.
