Why Copy Others? Insights from the Social Learning Strategies Tournament

Abstract
It Pays to Be a Copy Cat: Does it pay to copy what others do? Rendell et al. (p. 208 ) elected to copy Robert Axelrod's 1979 tournament in which strategies for playing the iterated prisoner's dilemma game were pitted against each other until an overall winner emerged—the tit-for-tat strategy. In the 2008 tournament, 100 social learning strategies designed to cope with a changing environment competed against each other; the winning strategy involved sampling the behaviors of other players periodically, rather than exploring the environment alone.