Prisoner's Dilemma on Facebook

In my research, I designed and implemented an online game accessable to a large diverse audience via the Facebook social network to test out game theoretic results and study social interactions. In this game, we designed scenarios that mirrored clas-sic game theory situations, most prominantly the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma game. The game allows for Facebook users to play each other in the Prisoner's Dilemma game while competing for a common goal. We then gather data on strategies em-ployed by players and compare them to classic game theoretic results and try to explain similarities and differences. We also look at social factors that were promi-nant in decision-making for players. Analysis includes disecting which factors (e.g. gender, age, etc.) affect players ' decisions and understanding winning strategies. We discovered that under the social setting of the experiment, factors that came into play for users ' decision-making included gender as well as potential payoffs. On the other hand, game play history and whether or not two people were friends were not significant in decision-making. Despite a high overall cooperation rate (over 70%)