Iterated Traveler’s Dilemma: Analysis of Individual and Team Performances and Challenges Ahead

An analysis of the relative performances of groups of closely related strategies competing in the Iterated Traveler’s Dilemma and how they perform when each such group is viewed as a team.

[PDF]

Abstract

We study the iterated version of Travelers Dilemma (TD). TD is a two-player, non-zero sum game that offers plenty of incentives for cooperation. Our goal is to gain deeper understanding of iterated two-player games whose structures are far from zero-sum. Our experimental study and analysis of Iterated TD is based on a round-robin tournament we have recently designed, implemented and analyzed. Our round-robin tournament involves 38 distinct participating strategies, and is motivated by the seminal work by Axelrod et al. on iterated Prisoners Dilemma. In this paper, we first motivate and define the strategies competing in our tournament, followed by a summary of the tournament results with respect to individual strategies. We then extend the comparison-and-contrast of the relative performances of different individual strategies in the tournament, and carefully analyze how groups of closely related strategies perform when each such group is viewed as a “team”. We draw some interesting lessons from the analyses of individual and team performances, and outline our ongoing and future work.

Keywords

game theory, non-zero-sum games, travelers dilemma, iterated games, bounded rationality, tournaments