ArticleNature communications2017
Resilient cooperators stabilize long-run cooperation in the finitely repeated Prisoner's Dilemma.
Article in Nature communications, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Predicting human cooperation: sensitizing drift-diffusion model to interaction and external stimuli.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Article
- Better-than-chance prediction of cooperative behaviour from first and second impressions.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Incentivizing free riders improves collective intelligence in social dilemmas.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Empirica: a virtual lab for high-throughput macro-level experiments.Behavior research methods · 2021Article
- Improving environment drives dynamical change in social game structure.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Cooperative responses in rats playing a 2 × 2 game: Effects of opponent strategy, payoff, and oxytocin.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2020Article
- Sex Affects the Relationship Between Third Party Punishment and Cooperation.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Norms and the Flexibility of Moral Action.Personality neuroscience · 2018Review
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Learning in finitely repeated games of cooperation remains poorly understood in part because their dynamics play out over a timescale exceeding that of traditional lab experiments. Here, we report results of a virtual lab experiment in which 94 subjects play up to 400 ten-round games of Prisoner's Dilemma over the course of twenty consecutive weekdays. Consistent with previous work, the typical round of first defection moves earlier for several days; however, this unravelling process stabilizes after roughly one week. Analysing individual strategies, we find that approximately 40% of players behave as resilient cooperators who avoid unravelling even at significant cost to themselves. Finally, using a standard learning model we predict that a sufficiently large minority of resilient cooperators can permanently stabilize unravelling among a majority of rational players. These results shed hopeful light on the long-term dynamics of cooperation, and demonstrate the importance of long-run experiments.
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