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The Evolutionary Robustness of Forgiveness and Cooperation

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We study the evolutionary robustness of strategies in innitely repeated prisoners' dilemma games in which players make mistakes with a small probability and are patient. The evolutionary process we consider is given by the replicator dynamics. We show that there are strategies with a uniformly large basin of attraction independent of the size of the population. Moreover, we show that those strategies forgive defections and, assuming that they are symmetric, they cooperate. We provide partial eciency results for asymmetric strategies.

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  • Pedro Dal BÛ & Enrique R. Pujals, 2013. "The Evolutionary Robustness of Forgiveness and Cooperation," Working Papers 2013-5, Brown University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:bro:econwp:2013-5
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    1. Ravi Bapna & Liangfei Qiu & Sarah Rice, 2014. "Repeated Interactions vs. Social Ties: Quantifying the Economic Value of Trust, Forgiveness, and Reputation Using a Field Experiment," Working Papers 14-07, NET Institute.

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