Some of them seemed to be playing randomly. Some of them decided that they didn’t like the game (too hard to understand, they weren’t getting enough candy, whatever) and cooperated in spite of partner defection as a way of checking out of the game. One guy didn’t even want to know what his partner had done last time during the iteration, he just defected every time—I guess that could be called a strategy, especially since he wound up with a randomly-playing partner that time.
Thanks. So they saw the game as another nuisance that the teachers thought up… As my game theory book says, “there’s really no point in playing poker except for sums of money it would really hurt to lose”.
I didn’t think that asking them all to put up cash would have gone over well, or I might have tried it. Besides, I got reimbursed for the candy and got to keep the leftovers.
Do you mean that they played randomly, or that they defected without articulating why?
Some of them seemed to be playing randomly. Some of them decided that they didn’t like the game (too hard to understand, they weren’t getting enough candy, whatever) and cooperated in spite of partner defection as a way of checking out of the game. One guy didn’t even want to know what his partner had done last time during the iteration, he just defected every time—I guess that could be called a strategy, especially since he wound up with a randomly-playing partner that time.
Thanks. So they saw the game as another nuisance that the teachers thought up… As my game theory book says, “there’s really no point in playing poker except for sums of money it would really hurt to lose”.
I didn’t think that asking them all to put up cash would have gone over well, or I might have tried it. Besides, I got reimbursed for the candy and got to keep the leftovers.