A matrix approach to generalizing Axelrod-type tournaments

Axelrod's (1980a, 1980b) Prisoner's Dilemma computer tournaments have motivated numerous investigations of cooperation, strategy choice, and strategic evolution. By having players adopt various strategies for playing the Prisoner's Dilemma, and then programming a computer to pit the strategies against each other in a round-robin format, Axelrod uncovered important principles about the evolution of cooperation in certain contexts, and stimulated others to extend his basic method into other settings. This article presents a matrix approach for calculating the results of an Axelrod-type tournament. This approach allows one to investigate the impact of changes in the format of the tournament, the nature of the payoff matrix, or the particular strategic choices of the players.