IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pur/prukra/1300.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Evolution of Cooperation: The Role of Costly Strategy Adjustments

Author

Listed:
  • Yaroslav Rosokha
  • Julian Romero

Abstract

We study the evolution of cooperation in the indenitely repeated prisoner's dilemma when it is costly for players to adjust their strategy. Our experimental interface allows subjects to design a comprehensive strategy that then selects actions for them in every period. We conduct lab experiments in which subjects can adjust their strategies during a repeated game but may incur a cost for doing so. We find three main results. First, subjects learn to cooperate more when adjustments are costless than when they are costly. Second, subjects make more adjustments to their strategies when adjustments are costless, but they still make adjustments even when they are costly. Finally, we find that cooperative strategies emerge over time when adjustments are costless but not when adjustments are costly. These results highlight that within-game experimentation and learning are critical to the rise of cooperative behavior. We provide simulations based on an evolutionary algorithm to support these results.

Suggested Citation

  • Yaroslav Rosokha & Julian Romero, 2017. "The Evolution of Cooperation: The Role of Costly Strategy Adjustments," Purdue University Economics Working Papers 1300, Purdue University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:pur:prukra:1300
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://business.purdue.edu/research/working-papers-series/2017/1300_RomeroRosokhaCooperationWithCosts.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Collins, Sean M. & James, Duncan & Servátka, Maroš & Vadovič, Radovan, 2021. "Attainment of equilibrium via Marshallian path adjustment: Queueing and buyer determinism," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 125(C), pages 94-106.
    2. Bigoni, Maria & Casari, Marco & Salvanti, Andrea & Skrzypacz, Andrzej & Spagnolo, Giancarlo, 2022. "It’s Payback Time: New Insights on Cooperation in the Repeated Prisoners’ Dilemma," IZA Discussion Papers 15023, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    3. Collins, Sean M. & James, Duncan & Servátka, Maroš & Vadovič, Radovan, 2020. "Attainment of Equilibrium: Marshallian Path Adjustment and Buyer Determinism," MPRA Paper 104103, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Roy Chen & Yan Chen & Yohanes E. Riyanto, 2021. "Best practices in replication: a case study of common information in coordination games," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 24(1), pages 2-30, March.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Indenitely Repeated Games; Prisoner's Dilemma; Experiments; Co-operation; Strategies;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pur:prukra:1300. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Business PHD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/kspurus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.