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Accounting for the ‘tragedy’ in the Prisoner's Dilemma

Abstract

The Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) exhibits a ‘tragedy’ in this sense: if the players are fully informed and rational, they are condemned to a jointly dispreferred outcome. In this essay I address the following question: What feature of the PD's payoff structure is necessary and sufficient to produce the tragedy? In answering it I use the notion of a “trembling-hand equilibrium”. In the final section I discuss an implication of my argument, an implication which bears on the persistence of the problem posed by the PD.

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I am grateful to J. Howard Sobel for helpful remarks on an earlier draft. I also thank Subir Chakrabarti for many valuable discussions, and for my initial acquaintance with the literature on equilibrium refinement.

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Tilley, J. Accounting for the ‘tragedy’ in the Prisoner's Dilemma. Synthese 99, 251–276 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01064431

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01064431

Keywords

  • Final Section
  • Payoff Structure