One small suggestion: if you wanted to, there are ways you could eliminate the phenomenon of ‘last round defection’. One idea would be to randomly generate the number of rounds according to an exponential distribution. This is equivalent to having, on each round, a small constant probability that this is the last round. To be honest though, the ‘last round’ phenomenon makes things more rather than less interesting.
Other ways to spice things up would be: to cause players to make mistakes with small probability (say a 1% chance of defecting when you try to co-operate, and vice versa); or have some probability of misremembering the past.
Thanks, this is all fascinating stuff.
One small suggestion: if you wanted to, there are ways you could eliminate the phenomenon of ‘last round defection’. One idea would be to randomly generate the number of rounds according to an exponential distribution. This is equivalent to having, on each round, a small constant probability that this is the last round. To be honest though, the ‘last round’ phenomenon makes things more rather than less interesting.
Other ways to spice things up would be: to cause players to make mistakes with small probability (say a 1% chance of defecting when you try to co-operate, and vice versa); or have some probability of misremembering the past.