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Nathaniel Hendrix's avatar

One of the most interesting ideas that spring from game theory is that there’s value in signaling your commitment to acting in a certain way. In the prisoner’s dilemma, people want to cooperate with others who’ve strongly signaled that they’ll cooperate. But this can become a kind of signaling race where people punish each other for signaling the wrong thing or violating norms that don’t have much to do with cooperation. So, maladaptive behaviors are retained because people use them as signals of their trustworthiness.

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OnTheOtterFoot's avatar

Thanks, good post! I had read plenty about the Prisoners' Dilemma, but not about the others. You gloss over what others treat as the most important point: Is the game one-shot, or repeated? (repeated how many times?) If it's repeated, then no fancy strategy has beaten the simple tit-for-tat strategy, I think, right? And if there's a society of players who will play each other in various combos multiple times, then you get "reputation" etc. etc., which you do delve into here in your post.

Anyway, thank you!

p.s. typo: The bottom right of the Matching Pennies matrix was 1,1 when I read this, but it should be 1,-1.

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