An Investigation of N-person Prisoners' Dilemmas

This paper is an attempt to systematically present the problem of various N-person Prisoners’ Dilemma games and some of their possible solutions. 13 characteristics of the game are discussed. The role of payoff curves, personalities, and neighborhood is investigated. Experiments are performed with a new simulation tool for multi-agent Prisoners’ Dilemma games. Investigations of realistic situations in which agents have various personalities show interesting new results. For the case of pavlovian agents the game has nontrivial but remarkably regular solutions. Examples of nonuniform distributions and mixed personalities are also presented. All solutions strongly depend on the choice of parameter values.