CONCLUSION
In conclusion, the following points are salient:
1. Tit for Tat is not an evolutionary stable strategy of indefinitely repeated two-actor Prisoner’s Dilemmas. Notwithstanding this fact, evolutionary game theorists view its relative success among other strategies as a promising explanation for how cooperation could emerge among actors whose conduct is limited to the prescriptions of strategic rationality, and who must compete over finite resources as a condition of their survival.
2. Evolutionary game theorists describe Tit for Tat as a nice strategy because its actors only seek at most half of the total environmentally available resources. Its relative success in the iterated PD game suggests that if individuals confront circumstances resembling this model, then they may do well to emulate it, and moreover it may be possible to act in accordance with this benign strategy and still obey the competitive logic of noncooperative game theory.
3. However, in evolutionary games, behavioral traits, such as always cooperating, never cooperating, or conditionally cooperating in a repeating PD with the same opponent, are programmed into agents rather than freely adopted on consideration and will.
4. Hence, for both the reasons that the repeating PD models such a rarified context that it does not pertain to those circumstances with many actors, distant futures, or few encounters, and that the behavioral norms derived as Nash equilibria of games emerge behind the back of agents without their reflection or conscious compliance, it remains unclear how valuable Tit for Tat is for achieving either the rule of law, private market exchange, or stability among nations.