HP Labs Technical Reports

Evolutionarily Stable Strategy Distributions for the Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma

Mowbray, Miranda

HPL-97-06
January 15, 1997
External

Keyword(s): Prisoner's Dilemma; evolutionarily stable strategy; stability

Abstract: This paper introduces the idea of an evolutionarily stable strategy distribution, which generalizes the idea of an evolutionarily stable strategy; roughly speaking, an evolutionarily stable strategy distribution is a finite set of symbiotic strategies which is unaffected by low levels of mutation. This idea is then applied to the -person Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma, of which the usual Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma is the special case =2. Given some standard assumptions on what mutations are possible, it is shown that if the probability of future interactions is sufficiently large, there are no evolutionarily stable strategy distributions. An example is given of an evolutionarily stable strategy distribution in the case when the set of possible mutant strategies is restricted.

21 Pages

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