RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Evolutionary successful strategies in a transparent iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 524348
DO 10.1101/524348
A1 Anton M. Unakafov
A1 Thomas Schultze
A1 Igor Kagan
A1 Sebastian Moeller
A1 Alexander Gail
A1 Stefan Treue
A1 Stephan Eule
A1 Fred Wolf
YR 2019
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/02/01/524348.abstract
AB A Transparent game is a game-theoretic setting that takes action visibility into account. In each round, depending on the relative timing of their actions, players have a certain probability to see their partner’s choice before making their own decision. This probability is determined by the level of transparency. At the two extremes, a game with zero transparency is equivalent to the classical simultaneous game, and a game with maximal transparency corresponds to a sequential game. Despite the prevalence of intermediate transparency in many everyday interactions such scenarios have not been sufficiently studied. Here we consider a transparent iterated Prisoner’s dilemma (iPD) and use evolutionary simulations to investigate how and why the success of various strategies changes with the level of transparency. We demonstrate that non-zero transparency greatly reduces the set of successful memory-one strategies compared to the simultaneous iPD. For low and moderate transparency the classical “Win – Stay, Lose – Shift” (WSLS) strategy is the only evolutionary successful strategy. For high transparency all strategies are evolutionary unstable in the sense that they can be easily counteracted, and, finally, for maximal transparency a novel “Leader-Follower” strategy outperforms WSLS. Our results provide a partial explanation for the fact that the strategies proposed for the simultaneous iPD are rarely observed in nature, where high levels of transparency are common.