We examine the game theoretic properties of a model of crime first introduced by Short et al. (2010 Phys. Rev. E82, 066114) as the SBD Adversarial Game. We identify the rationalizable strategies and one-shot equilibria under multiple equilibrium refinements. We further show that SBD's main result about the effectiveness of defecting-punishers (“Informants”) in driving the system to evolve to the cooperative equilibrium under an imitation dynamic generalizes to a best response dynamic, though only under certain parameter regimes. The nature of this strategy's role, however, differs significantly between the two dynamics: in the SBD imitation dynamic, Informants are sufficient but not necessary to achieve the cooperative equilibrium, while under the best response dynamic, Informants are necessary but not sufficient for convergence to cooperation. Since a policy of simply converting citizens to Informants will not guarantee success under best response dynamics, we identify alternative strategies that may help the system reach cooperation in this case, e.g., the use of moderate but not too severe punishments on criminals.
