Cooperation and coordination in the turn-taking dilemma

In many real-world situations, "cooperation" in the simple sense of the Prisoner's Dilemma is not sufficient for success: instead, cooperators must precisely coordinate more complex behaviors in a noisy environment. We investigate one such model, the Turn-Taking Dilemma, a variant of the repeated Prisoner's Dilemma in which the highest total payoff is achieved not by simultaneous mutual cooperation, but by taking turns defecting (alternating temptation and sucker payoffs). The Turn-Taking Dilemma more accurately models interactions where players must take short-term losses for long-term gains: situations marked by the intricate give-and-take of bargaining and compromise. Using "evolutionary dominance" as a general measure of performance, we investigated which strategies are most successful in Turn-Taking Dilemma interactions. Our experiments demonstrate that turn-taking can be achieved in a noisy environment, even when agents have strict resource constraints (limited memory strategies). Top strategies such as EXALT₂ can effectively coordinate turn-taking under noise, while exploiting cooperators and resisting exploitation by defectors; these strategies are likely to achieve success in the variety of real-world interactions modeled by the Turn-Taking Dilemma.