The Open-Strategy Dictator Game: Cooperation Under Mutual Transparency
Michael Glass
Abstract
We introduce the Open-Strategy Dictator Game (OSDG), a variant of the classic dictator game in which each player's strategy is a natural-language document visible to all participants. The dictator's decision, to SHARE or TAKE an endowment, may depend on the text of the recipient's strategy. A large language model adjudicates each interaction by interpreting the dictator's strategy in the context of the recipient's. We run round-robin tournaments among diverse strategies and analyze the resulting payoff matrix using softmax equilibrium frequencies, dominance analysis, and sensitivity to the relative value of cooperation. Conditionally cooperative strategies, those that share with cooperators and take from exploiters, consistently dominate, while unconditional strategies (always share or always take) are weakly dominated. The results suggest that in environments where agents can inspect each other's decision procedures, conditional cooperation is evolutionarily robust across a wide range of payoff parameters.
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