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Published May 25, 2022 | Version v1
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Experimental data: Inferring strategies from observations in long iterated prisoner's dilemma experiments

  • 1. Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Description

While many theoretical studies have revealed the strategies that could lead to and maintain cooperation in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, less is known about what human participants actually do in this game and how strategies change when being confronted with anonymous partners in each round. Previous attempts used short experiments, made different assumptions of possible strategies, and led to very different conclusions. We present here two long treatments that differ in the partner matching strategy used, i.e. fixed or shuffled partners. Here we use unsupervised methods to cluster the players based on their actions and then Hidden Markov Model to infer what are those strategies in each cluster. Analysis of the inferred strategies reveals that fixed partner interaction leads to a behavioral self-organization. Shuffled partners generate subgroups of strategies that remain entangled, apparently blocking the self-selection process that leads to fully cooperating participants in the fixed partner treatment. Analyzing the latter in more detail shows that AllC, AllD, TFT- and WSLS-like behavior can be observed. This study also reveals that long treatments are needed as experiments less than 25 rounds capture mostly the learning phase participants go through in these kinds of experiments.

Notes

Please refer to the file README.txt for a full detail of the columns used in the dataset.

Funding provided by: Vlaams AI-Onderzoeksprogramma*
Crossref Funder Registry ID:
Award Number: 952215

Funding provided by: Fonds De La Recherche Scientifique - FNRS
Crossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100002661
Award Number: 40005955

Funding provided by: Fonds De La Recherche Scientifique - FNRS
Crossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100002661
Award Number: 31257234

Funding provided by: Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek
Crossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100003130
Award Number: G.0391.13N

Funding provided by: FuturICT 2.0*
Crossref Funder Registry ID:
Award Number: FLAG-ERA JCT 2016

Funding provided by: Service Public de Wallonie Recherche*
Crossref Funder Registry ID:
Award Number: 2010235–ARIAC

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Supplementary_Information_21_3.pdf

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Additional details

Related works

Is cited by
10.1038/s41598-022-11654-2 (DOI)
Is derived from
10.5061/dryad.37pvmcvmk (DOI)