For the past several decades the Prisoners’ Dilemma has been a dominant frame in Game Theory. It’s quadrant model has crossed the boundaries of many disciplines especially political science, economics, business, biology, computer science and philosophy. There are also the games Stag Hunt, Chicken and Hawk-Dove which are 2×2 games. My argument in this post will be that the Prisoners’ Dilemma is not adequately representative of reality.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma was originally framed by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher while working on game theory at RAND in 1950 which Rand pursued because of possible applications to global nuclear strategy.
Albert W. Tucker formalized the game with prison sentence payoffs and gave it the “Prisoners’ Dilemma” name (Poundstone, 1992).
The game has two prisoners who cannot communicate and each has only two moves:
- to conceal their guilt or
- reveal their guilt
They are aware of the potential outcomes of their actions as follows:
The canonical payoff matrix for the game is represented as follows:
In “win-lose” terminology represents the game in the following manner: