The Evolutionary Robustness of Forgiveness and Cooperation

Abstract: We study the evolutionary robustness of strategies in infinitely repeated prisoners' dilemma games in which players make mistakes with a small probability and are patient. The evolutionary process we consider is given by the replicator dynamics. We show that there are strategies with a uniformly large basin of attraction independently of the size of the population. Moreover, we show that those strategies forgive defections and, assuming that they are symmetric, they cooperate.