"The Perception of an Extortionate Strategy as a Human Opponent within the Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma" a

Abstract:

The Prisoners’ Dilemma is one of the most well known topics within game theory, and combines research from many different fields. This joint honors thesis in Mathematics and Psychology examines Extortionate strategies, a set of strategy profiles discovered by Press and Dyson (2012). An Extortionate strategy uses the payoff matrix of the Prisoners’ Dilemma to limit the other player’s expected score. The primary goal of the research was to investigate how students playing against this strategy would react to their opponent, and whether they would perceive the actions of their opponent as a human or as a computer.