Word: axelrod
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...from leniency, unless his accomplice separately sells him out as well. The third option is that neither sells the other out, and each serves a sentence longer than if he had, but shorter than if he himself had been sold out. What's the best thing to do? Robert Axelrod, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, tested various strategies over a number of years and discovered that as the game is repeated over and over, a simple strategy of tit for tat tends to win: if someone gives you something, reciprocate; if no one does, don't. That...
...Axelrod found that players are most apt to gravitate to this system when they are likely to encounter the other players again. Without this "shadow of the future," there is every incentive to cheat--to drink but not share blood or, in the case of the stock market, to dump your shares at the first sign of a panic. So the larger and more anonymous the situation, the greater the incentive to be selfish...