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The advice takes the form of four simple suggestions for how to do well in a durable iterated Prisoner's Dilemma: 1. Don't be envious.
2. Don't be the first to defect.
3. Reciprocate both cooperation and defection.
4. Don't be too clever.

— Robert Axelrod The Evolution of Cooperation (1984)

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More quotes by Robert Axelrod

What makes it possible for cooperation to emerge is the fact that the players might meet again.

The Evolution of Cooperation (1984)

Proposition 5. ALL D is always collectively stable.

The Evolution of Cooperation (1984)

The two-person iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is the E. coli of the social sciences, allowing a very large variety of studies to be undertaken in a common framework.

The Complexity of Cooperation (1997)

Proposition 3. Any strategy which may be the first to cooperate can be collectively stable only when w is sufficiently large.

The Evolution of Cooperation (1984)

Proposition 4. For a nice strategy to be collectively stable, it must be provoked by the very first defection of the other player.

The Evolution of Cooperation (1984)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Robert Axelrod (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.