Repeated games

In class today we played a Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament.

You can find a recording of the session here.

We watched an episode of a game show that Peter correctly realised was an example of a Prisoner’s Dilemma. After this we played an Iterated Prisoners Dilemma tournament.

You can see the results here:

With the few minutes we had left I briefly spoke about how a repeated game is a particular type of an Extensive Form Game so that a strategy is now a mapping from history of play to actions available.

During the game, Lucas at one point declared: “We will cooperate until you defect and then we will defect forever”. This is exactly what a strategy is from a Mathematical point of view.

I mentioned Robert Axelrod’s Tournaments which are a widely cited body of work that is essentially akin to the tournament we played in class today (on a bigger scale).

On Friday we will spend a bit more time looking at some of the theory in the notes.