Getting recommendation is not always better

TL;DR

This paper investigates how different recommendation and memory strategies affect agent performance in an extended Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, revealing that receiving recommendations does not always improve outcomes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel extension of the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma with recommendation evaluation and memory limitations, analyzing their impact on agent behavior.

Findings

Realist agents perform the best.

Optimist agents perform the worst.

Receiving recommendations does not always lead to better results.

Abstract

We present an extended version of the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma game in which agents with limited memory receive recommendations about the unknown opponent to decide whether to play with. Since agents can receive more than one recommendations about the same opponent, they have to evaluate the recommendations according to their disposition such as optimist, pessimist, or realist. They keep their firsthand experience in their memory. Since agents have limited memory, they have to use different forgetting strategies. Our results show that getting recommendations not always perform better. We observe that realist performs the best and optimist the worse.