Effects of increasing the number of players and memory size in the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma: A numerical approach

The Prisoner's Dilemma has become a paradigm for the evolution of altruistic behaviour. Here we present results of numerical simulations of the infinitely iterated stochastic simultaneous Prisoner's Dilemma considering players with longer memory, encounters of more than two players as well as different pay-off values. This provides us with a better foundation to compare theoretical results to experimental data. We show that the success of the strategy Pavlov, regardless of its simplicity, is far more general by having an outstanding role in the iterated N-player N-memory Prisoner's Dilemma. Besides, we study influences of increased memory sizes in the iterated two-player Prisoner's Dilemma, and present comparisons to results of experiments with first-year students.