Abstract
Conflict of interest may be modeled, heuristically, by the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma game. Although several researchers have shown that the Tit-For-Tat strategy can encourage the evolution of cooperation, this strategy can never outscore any opponent and it does poorly against its clone in a noisy environment. Here we examine the family of Pavlovian strategies which adapts its play by positive and negative conditioning, much as many animals do. Mutual cooperation will evolve in a contest with Pavlov against a wide variety of opponents and in particular against its clone. And the strategy is quite stable in a noisy environment. Although this strategy cooperates and retaliates, as does Tit-For-Tat, it is not forgiving; Pavlov will exploit altruistic strategies until he is punished by mutual defection. Moreover, Pavlovian strategies are natural models for many real life conflict-of-interest encounters as well as human and computer simulations.
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Kraines, D., Kraines, V. Learning to cooperate with Pavlov an adaptive strategy for the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma with noise. Theor Decis 35, 107–150 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01074955
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01074955