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'Snowdrift' game tops 'Prisoner's Dilemma' in explaining cooperation (2007)

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Re: 'Snowdrift' game tops 'Prisoner's Dilemma' in explaining cooperation (2007)

#71

Post by iainmerrick »

jzl wrote: post #55

I've seen a couple of oblique references to this in other comments, but I'll go a little deeper: if you want to truly understand the prisoner's dilemma scenario and how it relates to human, or more generally, animal behavior, there is incredible coverage of the topic in Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. He pioneered the idea of running PD "competitions" in an attempt to discover the best evolutionary strategy for PD…

Richard Dawkins didn't pioneer that idea, it was Robert Axelrod. The seminal book about the topic is Axelrod's "The Evolution of Cooperation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation

(Dawkins was a prominent advocate of Axelrod's work, though. And "The Selfish Gene" is definitely a great read in its own right.)

Re: 'Snowdrift' game tops 'Prisoner's Dilemma' in explaining cooperation (2007)

#73

Post by Nomentatus »

Uhhh... what made PD important was that it was, precisely, the extreme of non-cooperation; a situation where cooperation was logically possible, but not rational. EVERY other game where cooperation is at least possible is better at promoting cooperation, not just one. If peeps have thought iterated PDs are the acme of cooperation, that's pretty crazy, too.

Re: 'Snowdrift' game tops 'Prisoner's Dilemma' in explaining cooperation (2007)

#74

Post by kbenson »

jzl wrote: post #55

I've seen a couple of oblique references to this in other comments, but I'll go a little deeper: if you want to truly understand the prisoner's dilemma scenario and how it relates to human, or more generally, animal behavior, there is incredible coverage of the topic in Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. He pioneered the idea of running PD "competitions" in an attempt to discover the best evolutionary strategy for PD…

> - The agent must have a good chance of competing against the opponent more than once.

I was actually thinking about this the other day. I was wondering how much the population size and matching algorithm in the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma matter to the strategy outcome. I suspect it's quite a lot, given that if you never play the same opponent again, strategies that defect often should come out quite well, but if you always play the same opponent, strategies that cooperate should do well. If grouping is bought into the system, such that there are multiple levels of subgroups with the smaller the group both are members in having higher chances of replaying in the same round, you might see interesting emergent behavior.

I also wonder if that might allow for special elements (the "sociopath") to have interesting divergent strategies that work well as long as they don't achieve more than a small fraction of the total population and keep a relatively large amount of interactions to strangers.

Re: 'Snowdrift' game tops 'Prisoner's Dilemma' in explaining cooperation (2007)

#75

Post by pizza »

jzl wrote: post #55

I've seen a couple of oblique references to this in other comments, but I'll go a little deeper: if you want to truly understand the prisoner's dilemma scenario and how it relates to human, or more generally, animal behavior, there is incredible coverage of the topic in Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. He pioneered the idea of running PD "competitions" in an attempt to discover the best evolutionary strategy for PD…

That was Axelrod's tournament iirc

Re: 'Snowdrift' game tops 'Prisoner's Dilemma' in explaining cooperation (2007)

#76

Post by Danihan »

majewsky wrote: post #65
Danihan wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does, no one really has a net worth one way or another when they are a child. Define righteous? Define immoral? Capitalism rewards providing actual value to people. It doesn't reward shallow niceties and self-righteousness, those are common.

> Define righteous? Define immoral? The point here was that credit scores do not only rate your own behavior, but also those of people around you. If your neighborhood is bad, your credit score might reflect that instead of your own performance as a debtor. And if your neighborhood becomes hip and gains a better reputation, your credit score might improve even though you're still the same person.

Could you send me something reflecting why you think credit scores are based on the neighborhood in which you reside?

Re: 'Snowdrift' game tops 'Prisoner's Dilemma' in explaining cooperation (2007)

#77

Post by theobon »

kbenson wrote: post #74
jzl wrote: post #55

I've seen a couple of oblique references to this in other comments, but I'll go a little deeper: if you want to truly understand the prisoner's dilemma scenario and how it relates to human, or more generally, animal behavior, there is incredible coverage of the topic in Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. He pioneered the idea of running PD "competitions" in an attempt to discover the best evolutionary strategy for PD…

> - The agent must have a good chance of competing against the opponent more than once. I was actually thinking about this the other day. I was wondering how much the population size and matching algorithm in the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma matter to the strategy outcome. I suspect it's quite a lot, given that if you never play the same opponent again, strategies that defect often should come out quite well, but if y…

http://ncase.me/trust/ is a great explainer that explores that question. How do different strategies compare depending on number of repeat interactions, population diversity and noise.

Re: 'Snowdrift' game tops 'Prisoner's Dilemma' in explaining cooperation (2007)

#78

Post by freech »

This does not at all explain human behaviour: Most people would not shovel all the snow themselves while their counterpart chills in their car. And many people cooperate in prisoner's dilemma situations.

What explains human behaviour is that with every action we program ourselves to follow certain strategies and rules and that others can judge to some extent which strategies we programmed ourselves to follow. Thus we have an incentive to follow strategies that lead others to trust us, so that we'll have more opportunities for cooperation in the future.

Re: 'Snowdrift' game tops 'Prisoner's Dilemma' in explaining cooperation (2007)

#79

Post by xaa »

I get why game theory is an attractive model to explain human behavior. But I always wonder why they invent the game, and try to explain behavior in terms of a particular model, rather than using real behavior to fit model parameters, so you could get (pseudo-) empirical numbers for "payoffs" etc.

Or maybe another way of putting it is that clearly rational and human behavior varies with the payoff structure, so it would make sense to include that as another variable.

Re: 'Snowdrift' game tops 'Prisoner's Dilemma' in explaining cooperation (2007)

#80

Post by kbenson »

theobon wrote: post #77
kbenson wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - The agent must have a good chance of competing against the opponent more than once. I was actually thinking about this the other day. I was wondering how much the population size and matching algorithm in the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma matter to the strategy outcome. I suspect it's quite a lot, given that if you never play the same opponent again, strategies that defect often should come out quite well, but if y…

http://ncase.me/trust/ is a great explainer that explores that question. How do different strategies compare depending on number of repeat interactions, population diversity and noise.

Thanks, I think someone linked to that here the other week, but I didn't have a chance to go through it at the time. It's very well done, so I'm glad you supplied the impetus to revisit it. :)
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