Coercion versus cooperation

[_Gunnar]

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/13080 ... s3193.html

Summary:
-There is a class of coercive strategies (ZD) that do really well against cooperative ones;
-However they do terribly against themselves and so are evolutionarily unstable (will become extinct), whereas the cooperative strategy will not.
-This can be modified by adding a "tag" to the player saying whether he is a ZD player or not; then two ZD players can choose to cooperate with each other but not with other, non-ZD players - in that case tagged ZD is dominant.
-If non-ZD players ALSO have the ability to recognize the tags, and thus "punish" ZD players, both ZD and cooperative strategies are evolutionarily stable and can coexist.
-In that case there will likely be an evolutionary arms race for tag recognition as well

I thought this might be interesting to some haven players - if you want to be a raiding group, its more profitable to only prey on "sheep", and cooperate with other "wolves" (remind you of anything?). And if you are a cooperative "sheep", try to act like a wolf towards wolves, but cooperate as much as you can with other broadly peaceful people...
It also shows the importance of getting as much information as you can on others, and hiding information about yourself, in a nice mathematical way.

[AnnaC]

Basically, play nice, but if someone wants to bite, make sure you can bite back?

[_Gunnar]

Basically, play nice, but if someone wants to bite, make sure you can bite back?

that is one of the strategies yes
the other one is "bite people who won't bite you back"

[Sevenless]

Yup, it makes sense and I'd say we can definitely see some levels of these strategies being played out in haven. Haven is slightly more nuanced (for example, players having vendettas or previous experience actually violates this game theory technically) but the basics hold up.

The sheep snapping at wolves aspect isn't seen as much mostly due to the nature of haven's combat. Sheep just don't have enough combat power to punish wolves by and large, and for game theory they're assuming equal retaliation abilities.

[dageir]

"No enterprise is more likely to succeed than one concealed from the enemy until it is ripe for execution."