Berlin 2015 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 6: Evolutionary Game Theory I (joint session SOE / BP / DY)

SOE 6.1: Talk

Monday, March 16, 2015, 15:00–15:15, MA 001

Dynamics of human behaviour in prisoner dilemma games — •Martin Spanknebel and Klaus Pawelzik — Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Bremen, Germany

When playing simple games humans sometimes fail to achieve maximally possible earnings, which is often considered to reflect 'irrationality'. Such behaviour has been attributed to accessory objectives or emotional biases. For instance, recently humans were found to cooperate far less than required for optimizing mean payoff when playing prisoner dilemma games against extortion strategies. But against generous strategies humans optimise their behaviour properly. Here we propose an alternative explanation based on preference shifts towards choices that proved more rewarding in the immediate past. This 'melioration' is found to account for human behaviour in prisoner dilemma games with opponents exhibiting different degrees of extortion and generosity. In particular, melioration explains reduced cooperation in extortion and high cooperation in generous games and reproduces the broad distributions of choice rates in ensembles of players. These results indicate that the alleged irrational ity of human behaviour could be the consequence of elementary learning mechanisms and not necessarily involves auxiliary motives.