The familiar two-person prisoner's dilemma (PD) game can be considered a special u s e of a general family of games with more than two players. This family of games is of particular interest, having been suggested as a model for a variety of sochl conflict situations. A subset of this family of games, called the uniform PD, is defined, for which the members of the subset may be scaled along a dimension of competitiveness for any given number of players. An index of competitiveness was derived and tested for the three-person case. Sixty volunteer subjects played one of five three-person uniform PD games, chosen to vary across the range of values of the index. Each triad phycd 150 trials of the same game for points which were converted to a s h at the end of the experiment. Subjects were run in triads homogeneous with respect to sex; effects due to that variable were absent. The obtained proportions of cooperative response were found to be strongly related to the value of the index. The approach offers a theoretical basis for assessment of behavior in multiperson conflict situations of the PD variety. i A f t e r over a decade of intensive investigation of two-person mixedmotive games stimulated by the exposure of social scientists to game theory (Luce and Raiffa, 1957), interest is increasing in an extension of this paradigm to the situation where the number of players may exceed AUTHORS' NOTE: This research is based on a portion of an hLA. thesis

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Thirty-six subjects participated in two-person zero-sum games played against an experimenter in an examination of the effect of different types of game matrices and different mixed strategies on behavior. Results showed that when the opponent played nonoptimally, subjects were able to detect this nonoptimality and to exploit it to their own benefit. When the opponent played according to the minimax prescription, subjects' performance was not optimal but was sufficiently and consistently close to it that arguments in terms of differences between perceived and objective probabilities provide an attractive explanation for the differences.

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