Robust program equilibrium

One approach to achieving cooperation in the one-shot prisoner’s dilemma is Tennenholtz’s (Games Econ Behav 49(2):363–373, 2004) program equilibrium, in which the players of a game submit programs instead of strategies. These programs are then allowed to read each other’s source code to decide which action to take. As shown by Tennenholtz, cooperation is played in an equilibrium of this alternative game. In particular, he proposes that the two players submit the same version of the following program: cooperate if the opponent is an exact copy of this program and defect otherwise. Neither of the two players can benefit from submitting a different program. Unfortunately, this equilibrium is fragile and unlikely to be realized in practice. We thus propose a new, simple program to achieve more robust cooperative program equilibria: cooperate with some small probability $$\epsilon $$ ϵ and otherwise act as the opponent acts against this program. I argue that this program is similar to the tit for tat strategy for the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. Both “start” by cooperating and copy their opponent’s behavior from “the last round”. We then generalize this approach of turning strategies for the repeated version of a game into programs for the one-shot version of a game to other two-player games. We prove that the resulting programs inherit properties of the underlying strategy. This enables them to robustly and effectively elicit the same responses as the underlying strategy for the repeated game.