A concept · How to Decide With Others · Strategy
The Prisoner's Dilemma
Two rational choices add up to a worse outcome for both.
Why does everyone in the office stay late when everyone would rather leave at six? If one person leaves while the others stay, they look like the slacker. If everyone left together, everyone would keep their standing and gain their evenings. Nobody can go first, so nobody goes. What kind of situation makes sensible people choose, together, an outcome none of them wants?
What The Prisoner's Dilemma means
The prisoner's dilemma is a situation in which each party has a move that is better for them whatever the other does, yet when both make that move the result is worse for both than if each had made the other move. Individually sound choices produce a jointly bad outcome, and the trap sits in the payoffs, not in the people. Owning this changes who we blame and what we try to fix. We stop appealing to reason, because reason is what led both players into the corner, and we stop looking for the stupid or selfish party. We ask what the payoffs are and how to change them: make the game repeat, make defection visible and costly, or bind both hands at once with a rule neither could adopt alone. Before, the arms race was a story about the leaders. After, it is a table of payoffs that any two leaders would have filled in the same way.
The Prisoner's Dilemma examples: where it shows up
- At work: a culture of overwork is blamed on ambition when a single rule from the top would rewrite the payoff table and send everyone home.
- With money: price wars between competitors leave both poorer and customers barely better off, and neither firm can be the one to stop cutting.
- In the news: athletes in a sport with weak testing all dope, finish in the order they would have anyway, and carry the risk for nothing until the testing changes the payoffs.
Where it sits
Open to walk. See where The Prisoner's Dilemma sits on the sky →
Nearest on the sky
- Collective Action
- Nash Equilibrium
- The Security Dilemma
- Tit for Tat
- Tragedy of the Commons
- Trust and Social Capital
A filled dot marks a star that is already open to walk.
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