The Iterated Continuous Prisoner's Dilemma (2012)

Undergraduate: Ben Leyden

Faculty Advisor: Douglas Kelly
Department: Economics

---

The Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) is a two-person, mathematical game that has long been used to analyze real world events such as the arms escalation during the Cold War. However, the game, in which players simultaneously choose to cooperate or not cooperate with each other, has its limitations. The fact that players are restricted to a binary decision means the game cannot account for some of the subtleties in real world behavior in which decisions are not simply either/or but instead involve choices over a range of options. Thus, for example, the US did not just choose whether or not to build a bomb, but instead had to choose how many bombs to build. This project develops the Iterated Continuous Prisoner's Dilemma (ICPD), an extension of the IPD. The ICPD makes use of a larger set of actions for each player thus creating the opportunity to more precisely model real world strategies. This project develops the ICPD and then analyzes a number of abstract scenarios in order to determine the usefulness of the new game. The project finds that the ICPD does in fact provide insights that would otherwise not have been possible through use of the IPD.