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Abstract

A Transparent game is a game-theoretic setting that takes
action visibility into account. In each round, depending on the relative timing of their actions, players have a certain probability to see their partner’s choice before making their own decision. This probability is determined by the level of transparency. At the two extremes, a game with zero
transparency is equivalent to the classical simultaneous game, and a game
with maximal transparency corresponds to a sequential game. Despite the
prevalence of intermediate transparency in many everyday interactions
such scenarios have not been sufficiently studied. Here we consider a transparent iterated Prisoner’s dilemma (iPD) and use evolutionary simulations to investigate how and why the success of various strategies changes
with the level of transparency.We demonstrate that non-zero transparency
greatly reduces the set of successful memory-one strategies compared to
the simultaneous iPD. For low and moderate transparency the classical
“Win - Stay, Lose - Shift” (WSLS) strategy is the only evolutionary successful strategy. For high transparency all strategies are evolutionary unstable
in the sense that they can be easily counteracted, and, finally, for maximal
transparency a novel “Leader-Follower” strategy outperforms WSLS. Our
results provide a partial explanation for the fact that the strategies proposed for the simultaneous iPD are rarely observed in nature, where high
levels of transparency are common.