ABSTRACT
Strategies—decision rules that guide people’s choices in social dilemmas—are one of the most important concepts in social dilemma research. Most of the research in this area has been centered around the factors—micropsychological as well as macrostructural—that affect people’s use of strategies. Perhaps the most well known study of strategies in social dilemma research is Axelrod’s (1984) investigation of the tit for tat (TFT) strategy. TFT is a set of rules that an agent facing an iterated prisoner’s dilemma (PD) may adopt, according to which he or she cooperates in the first trial and thereafter simply repeats the partner’s choice in the previous trial. Axelrod invited prominent game theorists to a computer tournament to determine the best strategies for playing iterated PD. The submitted strategies played an iterated PD game with each of the submitted strategies, and TFT was the best overall performer in this tournament.
