EFFECTS OF INCREASING THE NUMBER OF PLAYERS AND MEMORY SIZE IN THE ITERATED PRISONERS-DILEMMA - A NUMERICAL APPROACH

The Prisoner's Dilemma has become a paradigm for the evolution of altr uistic behaviour. Here we present results of numerical simulations of the infinitely iterated stochastic simultaneous Prisoner's Dilemma con sidering players with longer memory, encounters of more than two playe rs as well as different pay-off values. This provides us with a better foundation to compare theoretical results to experimental data. We sh ow that the success of the strategy Pavlov, regardless of its simplici ty, is far more general by having an outstanding role in the iterated N-player N-memory Prisoner's Dilemma. Besides, we study influences of increased memory sizes in the iterated two-player Prisoner's Dilemma, and present comparisons to results of experiments with first-year stud ents.