Recognising and evaluating the effectiveness of extortion in the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma

Knight, Vincent ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4245-0638, Harper, Marc, Glynatsi, Nikoleta E. and Gillard, Jonathan ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9166-298X 2024. Recognising and evaluating the effectiveness of extortion in the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. PLoS ONE 19 (7) , e0304641. 10.1371/journal.pone.0304641

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Abstract

Establishing and maintaining mutual cooperation in agent-to-agent interactions can be viewed as a question of direct reciprocity and readily applied to the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. Agents cooperate, at a small cost to themselves, in the hope of obtaining a future benefit. Zero-determinant strategies, introduced in 2012, have a subclass of strategies that are provably extortionate. In the established literature, most of the studies of the effectiveness or lack thereof, of zero-determinant strategies is done by placing some zero-determinant strategy in a specific scenario (collection of agents) and evaluating its performance either numerically or theoretically. Extortionate strategies are algebraically rigid and memory-one by definition, and requires complete knowledge of a strategy (the memory-one cooperation probabilities). The contribution of this work is a method to detect extortionate behaviour from the history of play of an arbitrary strategy. This inverts the paradigm of most studies: instead of observing the effectiveness of some theoretically extortionate strategies, the largest known collection of strategies will be observed and their intensity of extortion quantified empirically. Moreover, we show that the lack of adaptability of extortionate strategies extends via this broader definition.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	Published
Schools:	Advanced Research Computing @ Cardiff (ARCCA) Mathematics
Additional Information:	License information from Publisher: LICENSE 1: URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Publisher:	Public Library of Science
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	29 July 2024
Date of Acceptance:	16 May 2024
Last Modified:	01 Aug 2024 10:24
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/170982

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