Modelling contextual decision-making in dilemma games

Abstract

Social dilemmas such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons have attracted widespread interest in several social sciences and humanities including economics, sociology and philosophy. Different frameworks of human decision-making produce different answers to these dilemmas. Common for most real-world analyses of the dilemmas is finding that behaviour and choices depend on the decision context. Thus an all-in-one solution such as the rational choice model is untenable. Rather, a framework for agent-based social simulation of real-world behaviour should start by recognising different modes of decision-making. This paper presents such a framework and an initial evaluation of its results in two cases, (1) a repeated prisoner’s dilemma tournament playing against a set of well-known base models, and (2) a Tragedy of the Commons simulation.