Using the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma for Explaining the Evolution of Cooperation in Open Source Communities

Software development, and especially open source projects, typically involve repeated interactions between participants and groups of participants. We propose to analyse this situation by means of the standard model for the evolution of cooperation, the iterated prisoner's dilemma. The prisoner's dilemma is a well-known model for a two-person game, in which each side can choose to either cooperate or defect, and in which the payoffs are arranged in a defined hierarchy (e.g. the highest payoff is achieved by defecting while the other player cooperates). As a first step, the prisoner's dilemma needs to be formulated for the open source development model, i.e. what constitutes cooperation, playing defect and payoffs. Then, computer simulations using a population of stochastic reactive strategies can be applied, using a strategy's payoff as fitness measure for determining its frequency in the next generation. As a further extension, the effects of misinterpretation of other...