title: Evolutionary stability in the n-person iterated prisoner's dilemma.
abstract: The iterated prisoner's dilemma game has been used extensively in the study of the evolution of cooperative behaviours in social and biological systems. The concept of evolutionary stability provides a useful tool to analyse strategies for playing the game. Most results on evolutionary stability, however, are based on the 2-person iterated prisoner's dilemma game. This paper extends the results in the 2-person game and shows that no finite mixture of pure strategies in the n-person iterated prisoner's dilemma game can be evolutionarily stable, where n > 2. The paper also shows that evolutionary stability can be achieved if mistakes are allowed in the n-person game.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of New South Wales, Canberra, Australia. xin@csadfa.cs.adfa.oz.au
authors.forename: X
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Yao
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D005075:Biological Evolution; D005716:Game Theory; D006801:Humans; D008433:Mathematics; D011593:Psychology, Social