Using Game Theory to Think More Critically
My brother and I are about the same age and when we were younger, we often got in trouble together. We weren’t delinquents. I’m talking about kid-trouble like running in the house when we were told not to and we bumped into something and broke it. When our parents asked what happened we would never tell on each other. We never agreed beforehand that we weren’t going to tell on each other; it’s just something we somehow agreed not to do. In retrospect, I think we subconsciously reasoned that if we were both at fault then the punishment we would receive would be far less severe. On a few occasions, we weren’t punished at all because our parents either didn’t know who to pin the blame on or they didn’t have the energy to deal with it (it was probably the latter). I’m not sure if this dynamic exists today amongst siblings, but this was our unwritten, but very real “kid-contract” for avoiding punishment. And it worked.
Unknowingly, my brother and I were engaged in a very common game of decision analysis called prisoner’s dilemma. By definition, “prisoner’s dilemma is a paradox in decision analysis in which two individuals acting in in their own self-interests do not produce the optimal outcome (1).” In more critical applications, the engaged individuals could be a group of people, businesses, or even countries. In the case of my brother and I, we knew in advance that we were…
