TY - JOUR
T1 - Strategy choice in the infinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma
AU - Dal Bó, Pedro
AU - Fréchette, Guillaume R.
N1 - Funding Information:
*Dal Bó: Department of Economics, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912 (email: pdalbo@brown.edu); Fréchette: Department of Economics, New York University, New York, NY 10012 (email: frechette@nyu.edu). Jeffrey Ely was the coeditor for this article. We are grateful to Jim Andreoni, Drew Fudenberg, Asen Ivanov, Thomas Palfrey, Philippe Jehiel, anonymous referees, and seminar participants at UCSD, Princeton, GMU, CMU, UQAM, Tilberg, Oxford, Stanford, Paris 1, Purdue, Washington St. Louis, Bologna, Harvard, Toronto, Columbia, Boston University, Boston College, HBS, Maastricht University, Bocconi University, CIDE, UBC, Sciences Po, Carlos III, CEMFI, University of Hawaii, UCSB, Chapman, Concordia University, Caltech, and at the ESA conference in Tucson, the Conference on Social Dilemmas, the SAET conference, the Conference on New Directions in Applied Microeconomics, and the Mont Tremblant conference for very useful comments. We thank Emanuel Vespa, Sevgi Yuksel, and Tianzan Pang for their research assistance, CASSEL (UCLA) and SSEL (Caltech) for the Multistage software, as well as Rajeev Advani and Anwar Ruff for its adaptation. Fréchette gratefully acknowledges the support of the NSF grants SES-0924780, SES-1225779, and SES-1558857 as well as support from the Center for Experimental Social Science (CESS), and the C. V. Starr Center. Dal Bó gratefully acknowledges the support of NSF via grant SES-0720753. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the NSF. The authors declare that they have no relevant or material financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper.
Funding Information:
Jeffrey Ely was the coeditor for this article. We are grateful to Jim Andreoni, Drew Fudenberg, Asen Ivanov, Thomas Palfrey, Philippe Jehiel, anonymous referees, and seminar participants at UCSD, Princeton, GMU, CMU, UQAM, Tilberg, Oxford, Stanford, Paris 1, Purdue, Washington St. Louis, Bologna, Harvard, Toronto, Columbia, Boston University, Boston College, HBS, Maastricht University, Bocconi University, CIDE, UBC, Sciences Po, Carlos III, CEMFI, University of Hawaii, UCSB, Chapman, Concordia University, Caltech, and at the ESA conference in Tucson, the Conference on Social Dilemmas, the SAET conference, the Conference on New Directions in Applied Microeconomics, and the Mont Tremblant conference for very useful comments. We thank Emanuel Vespa, Sevgi Yuksel, and Tianzan Pang for their research assistance, CASSEL (UCLA) and SSEL (Caltech) for the Multistage software, as well as Rajeev Advani and Anwar Ruff for its adaptation. Fréchette gratefully acknowledges the support of the NSF grants SES-0924780, SES-1225779, and SES-1558857 as well as support from the Center for Experimental Social Science (CESS), and the C. V. Starr Center. Dal Bó gratefully acknowledges the support of NSF via grant SES-0720753. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the NSF. The authors declare that they have no relevant or material financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 American Economic Association. All rights reserved.
PY - 2019/11
Y1 - 2019/11
N2 - We use a novel experimental design to reliably elicit subjects' strategies in an infinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma experiment with perfect monitoring. We find that three simple strategies repre- sent the majority of the chosen strategies: Always Defect, Tit-for-Tat, and Grim. In addition, we identify how the strategies systematically vary with the parameters of the game. Finally, we use the elicited strategies to test the ability to recover strategies using statistical methods based on observed round-by-round cooperation choices and find that this can be done fairly well, but only under certain conditions.
AB - We use a novel experimental design to reliably elicit subjects' strategies in an infinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma experiment with perfect monitoring. We find that three simple strategies repre- sent the majority of the chosen strategies: Always Defect, Tit-for-Tat, and Grim. In addition, we identify how the strategies systematically vary with the parameters of the game. Finally, we use the elicited strategies to test the ability to recover strategies using statistical methods based on observed round-by-round cooperation choices and find that this can be done fairly well, but only under certain conditions.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85076023829&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85076023829&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1257/aer.20181480
DO - 10.1257/aer.20181480
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85076023829
SN - 0002-8282
VL - 109
SP - 3929
EP - 3952
JO - American Economic Review
JF - American Economic Review
IS - 11
ER -