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Asymmetric prisoner's dilemmas

A more general set of games is asymmetric. As in the prisoner's dilemma, the best outcome is cooperation, and there are motives for defection. Unlike the symmetric prisoner's dilemma, though, one player has more to lose and/or more to gain than the other. Some such games have been described as a prisoner's dilemma in which one prisoner has an alibi, hence the term "alibi game".

In experiments, players getting unequal payoffs in repeated games may seek to maximize profits, but only under the condition that both players receive equal payoffs; this may lead to a stable equilibrium strategy in which the disadvantaged player defects every X game, while the other always co-operates. Such behavior may depend on the experiment's social norms around fairness.