How important is your reputation in a multi-agent environment

Most work on the evolutionary approach to the iterated prisoner's dilemma (IPD) game uses a binary model where the choice of each player can only be cooperation or defection. However, we rarely commit ourselves to complete cooperation or defection in the real world. This paper examines the continuous IPD game and similarities and differences between the discrete and continuous games. The paper also studies the issue of reputation of a player, following Nowak and Sigmund's recent work, and how it affects the evolution of cooperation. This study differs from Nowak and Sigmund's in that players in a population can have more than two levels of cooperation (or even continuous). The players are also changing all the time under the influence of selection, crossover and mutation. We think that this is a more realistic model of the evolution of society in the real world.