Summary in haiku form
The prisoners’ dilemma.
It’s a tragedy!
Summary in one paragraph
All games—most obviously games like rock-paper-scissors—can be described using a payoff matrix that lists the players’ strategies and the outcomes of the different strategy combinations. An important game is the prisoners’ dilemma, which is a two-player game in which players have dominant strategies that lead to a Pareto inefficient outcome. Generalizing the prisoners’ dilemma to more than two players produces the Tragedy of the Commons, a game that describes overfishing and overpollution and traffic congestion and many other problems. These situations are classic instances in which individual optimization does not lead to good outcomes for the group as a whole. There is, however, a glimmer of hope: competition between two sellers is a prisoners’ dilemma situation for the sellers, but it drivers sellers to provide consumers with good-quality products and low prices!
Notes on specific pages
Links to PD
Links to TOC games
Climate change
Links to Hardin
