prisoner's dilemma

Prisoner's Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb

by William Poundstone  · 2 Jan 1993  · 323pp  · 100,772 words

, Edward Teller, and Nicholas A. Vonneuman. CONTENTS Cover Other Books by this Author Title Page Dedication Acknowledgments 1 DILEMMAS The Nuclear Dilemma John von Neumann Prisoner’s Dilemma 2 JOHN VON NEUMANN The Child Prodigy Kun’s Hungary Early Career The Institute Klara Personality The Sturm und Drang Period The Best Brain in

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits

by Richard Davies  · 4 Sep 2019  · 412pp  · 128,042 words

fund the public services and infrastructure that might improve trust in government. A more cooperative system would surely lead to better outcomes, but as the Prisoner’s Dilemma of economics shows, this can be impossible to sustain, and it is possible to get stuck in this kind of negative loop indefinitely. Kinshasa destroys

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants

by Maurice E. Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi  · 14 May 2020  · 511pp  · 132,682 words

cognitive costs, it would be harder for consumers to discover a hotel with no resort fee that offers a better deal. This situation suggests a “Prisoner’s Dilemma” style game where the efficient outcome cannot be achieved because any hotel offering a better deal without a resort fee will lose business to competitors

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker  · 24 Sep 2012  · 1,351pp  · 385,579 words

aggression 502 8–3 Human brain, showing the major cortical regions that regulate aggression 503 8–4 Human brain, medial view 504 8–5 The Prisoner’s Dilemma 533 8–6 Apologies by political and religious leaders, 1900–2004 544 9–1 Implicit interest rates in England, 1170–2000 610 9–2 The

The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey

by Michael Huemer  · 29 Oct 2012  · 577pp  · 149,554 words

relatively minor sanctions, I focus on the coercive enforcement mechanism. 39 As Caplan and Stringham (2007, 299–302) put it, the cartel agencies face a prisoner’s dilemma with each other, in which it pays each to renege on the agreement to punish outsider agencies. 40 Klosko 2005, 30–3. 41 Klosko (2005

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs

by Tim Draper  · 18 Dec 2017  · 302pp  · 95,965 words

sing with all your heart. What can you do to free someone? Can you free your company? Your country? Freedom Puzzle This is called the prisoner’s dilemma. There are two suspects brought in for questioning. They are separated from one another. If one of them turns the other in, he gets a

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

by Annie Jacobsen  · 14 Sep 2015  · 558pp  · 164,627 words

unsolvable, and they presented it to the great John von Neumann. Flood and Dresher called their quandary the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It was based on a centuries-old dilemma tale. A contemporary rendition of the Prisoner’s Dilemma involves two criminal suspects faced with either prison time or a plea deal. The men, both members of

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World

by Tim Harford  · 1 Jan 2008  · 250pp  · 88,762 words

, 2006. 2. LAS VEGAS “Real life consists of bluffing”: Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974). His feats of calculation: William Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma (New York: Doubleday, 1992), contains many such stories. In the 1972 final: Two excellent sources on the history of poker and the great poker characters

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together

by Bruce Schneier  · 14 Feb 2012  · 503pp  · 131,064 words

individual piece of research.8 In the last chapter of Part I, I will introduce societal dilemmas. I'll explain a thought experiment called the Prisoner's Dilemma, and its generalization to societal dilemmas. Societal dilemmas describe the situations that require intra-group trust, and therefore use societal pressures to ensure cooperation: they

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to ensure widespread cooperation. Let's start with the smallest society possible: two people. Another model from game theory works here. It's called the Prisoner's Dilemma.1 Alice and Bob are partners in crime, and they've both been arrested for burglary.2 The police don't have enough evidence to

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involved. Competing interest: Minimize individual jail time. Group norm: To cooperate with the other prisoner and remain silent. Corresponding defection: Testify against the other. The Prisoner's Dilemma encapsulates the conflict between group interest and self-interest. As a pair, Alice and Bob are best off if they both remain silent and spend

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, defection doesn't necessarily imply anything immoral; it just means putting some competing interest ahead of the group interest. Basic commerce is another type of Prisoner's Dilemma, although you might not have thought about it that way before. Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter liked this story better than prisoners, confessions, and jail time

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parties do it, too. If you assume the individuals can switch between strategies and you set the parameters right, the Hawk-Dove game is a Prisoner's Dilemma. When pairs of individuals interact, they each have the choice of cooperating (being a dove) or defecting (being a hawk). Both individuals know that cooperating

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strategy for them as a pair, but that individually they're each better off being a hawk. Not every interaction between two people involves a Prisoner's Dilemma. Imagine two drivers who are both stuck because a tree is blocking the road. The tree is too heavy for one person to move on

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in both their selfish interest and their group interest to move the tree together. But Prisoner's Dilemmas are common, and once you're primed to notice them, you'll start seeing them everywhere.4 The basic Prisoner's Dilemma formula involves two people who must decide between their own self-interest and the interest of

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one to limit the harvest, and a Tragedy of the Commons can result. A Tragedy of the Commons is more complicated than a two-person Prisoner's Dilemma, because the other fishers aren't making this decision collectively. Instead, each individual fisher decides for himself what to do. In the two-person dilemma

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societal pressures as a way to enforce cooperation and hold society together. Part II A Model of Trust Chapter 6 Societal Pressures In game theory, Prisoner's Dilemmas have no solution. Because the two prisoners, or the merchant and customer, can't trust each other, they both end up defecting. The larger societal

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. We mostly vaccinate our children, despite the minor risk of an adverse reaction. Sometimes, even, we don't rat on each other in prison.1 Prisoner's Dilemmas involve a risk trade-off between group interest and self-interest, but it's generally only a dilemma if you look at it very narrowly

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, having caught his own prey, he would have cared very little about having caused his companions to lose theirs. What makes this different than the Prisoner's Dilemma is that the benefit of cooperation is more than the benefit of defection: a stag is much more food, even divided a few ways, than

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one of them shovels, both are freed; and two shovelers will get the job done much faster and more reliably than one. But unlike a Prisoner's Dilemma, it's in each driver's best interest to cooperate, even if the other defects.4 It turns out there are several different dilemmas5—generally

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at the details of players' competing interests, motivations, and priorities, you often realize they might not be playing the same game. What might be a Prisoner's Dilemma for Alice could be a Snowdrift for Bob. What might be a Snowdrift for Alice might be a Stag Hunt for Bob. For Alice, cooperating

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to eliminate the dilemma. Recall the two drivers stuck behind a fallen tree that neither one can move by himself. They're not in a Prisoner's Dilemma. They're not even in a Snowdrift Dilemma. In their situation, their selfish interest coincides with the group interest—they're going to move the

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on the scales. Solving societal dilemmas often means considering the people involved and their situations more broadly. The sealed-bag exchange is no longer a Prisoner's Dilemma if we assume the people involved have a sufficiently strong conscience. Alice might be thinking: “If I assume Bob will cooperate, I have two choices

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interest, society implements these societal pressures: Institutional: The group fines stores that close during common hours. As we saw in the previous chapter, solving a Prisoner's Dilemma involves changing the costs and benefits of acting in the person's selfish interest versus acting in the group interest. Shopping malls solve their

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Prisoner's Dilemma by using fines. A fine raises the cost of a store owner acting in his self-interest. Raise that cost high enough, and owners will

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include people we would never have even considered talking to in high school, and yet we help water their imaginary plants? Chapter 5 (1) The Prisoner's Dilemma was originally framed in the 1950s by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher at the RAND Corporation, and was named several years later by Albert Tucker

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hawkish strategy works great, as long as he only meets doves at intersections. (5) One database search yielded 73,000 academic papers with the phrase “Prisoner's Dilemma” in the title. (6) Hardin used an open grazing pasture as an example. From the paper: Picture a pasture open to all. It is to

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to have brought out the worst in people. (4) For many interactions, the Snowdrift Dilemma is a better model of the real world than the Prisoner's Dilemma. (5) There's also the unfortunately named Battle of the Sexes. He wants to do a stereotypically male thing on Saturday night. She wants to

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following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in line with the in-group loyalty effects I talked about earlier. Chapter 8 (1) Researchers have used the Prisoner's Dilemma to study this.People who defect predict a 76% defection rate from other players, and people who cooperate predict a 68% cooperation rate. Put in

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cooperate and who would defect. In another experiment, players were asked to evaluate the intentions of their opponents at various points during a multi-round Prisoner's Dilemma game. Cooperative players were better at recognizing other cooperative players; defecting players regularly mischaracterized cooperative players as defecting. This isn't surprising since people tend

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the other players, and less so when they were anonymous and alone in a room. (3) In 1984, political scientist Robert Axelrod studied an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. He set up a computer tournament and invited academic colleagues from all over to compete against each other. What he found was interesting, and in

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argue with the customer about where the item was purchased. They no longer do this; presumably too many defectors took advantage of the system. (6) Prisoner's Dilemma experiments confirm that when players know each other's reputations—instead of being anonymous—cooperation jumps from around 50% to around 80%. (7) Dueling isn

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with two hands to Japanese colleagues, and drink beer with German colleagues even if we prefer wine. (15) There's an alternate analysis of the Prisoner's Dilemma that bears this out. So far, we've been doing a fairly straightforward analysis of Alice's and Bob's options to determine which ones

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Bob are not complete strangers, they may know something about each other and how the other is likely to proceed. If Alice is in a Prisoner's Dilemma with Bob, and knows that Bob is from the same culture, shares the same religion, and is a member of the same social class, Alice

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, one could argue, by and large wise and honorable. Does this suggest, then, a moral dimension to compression? (7) If you think back to the Prisoner's Dilemma, the police deliberately put the prisoners in that artificial and difficult situation to induce their cooperation. It turns out this is a useful mechanism for

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Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure, Cambridge University Press. Snowdrift Dilemma Michael Doebeli and Christoph Hauert (2005), “Models of Cooperation Based on the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Snowdrift Game,” Ecology Letters, 8:748–66. social dilemmas Robyn M. Dawes (1980), “Social Dilemmas,” Annual Review of Psychology, 31:169–93. Samuel

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–9. taking advantage Jelena Gruji, Constanza Fosco, Lourdes Araujo, José A. Cuesta, and Angel Sánchez (2010), “Social Experiments in the Mesoscale: Humans Playing a Spatial Prisoner's Dilemma,” PLoS ONE, 5:11, e13749. Andrew Colman Andrew M. Colman (1995), Game Theory and Its Applications in the Social and Biological Sciences, Second Edition, Routledge

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of the Gastrointestinal Tract,” Annual Review of Microbiology, 31:107–33. some mixture Stephen Le and Robert Boyd (2007), “Evolutionary Dynamics of the Continuous Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma,” Journal of Theoretical Biology, 245:258–67. population density Pierre Auger and Dominique Pontier (1998), “Fast Game Theory Coupled to Slow Population Dynamics: The Case

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(2011), “Online Social Network Size Is Reflected in Human Brain Structure,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, published online before print. Chapter 5 Prisoner's Dilemma Merrill M. Flood (1952), “Some Experimental Games,” Research Memorandum RM 789–1, The RAND Corporation. Republished as: Merrill M. Flood (1958), “Some Experimental Games,” Management

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Rolf Kümmerli, Caroline Colliard, Nicolas Fiechter, Blaise Petitpierre, Flavien Russier, and Laurent Keller (2007), “Human Cooperation in Social Dilemmas: Comparing the Snowdrift Game with the Prisoner's Dilemma,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 274:2965–70. Prospect Theory Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (1979), “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision

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Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000, Crown Business. cooperation jumps Claus Wedekind and Manfred Milinski (1996), “Human Cooperation in the Simultaneous and the Alternating Prisoner's Dilemma: Pavlov Versus Generous Tit-for-Tat,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 93:2686–9. Dueling isn't

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-Cultural Research, 37:211–39. breeding females James Acheson and Roy Gardner (2011), “The Evolution of the Maine Lobster V-Notch Practice: Cooperation in a Prisoner's Dilemma Game,” Ecology & Society, 16:41. Edney listed several Julian J. Edney (1981), “Paradoxes on the Commons: Scarcity and the Problem of Inequality,” Journal of Community

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(2011), The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What it Means to Be Alive, Doubleday. useful mechanism Gordon Tullock (1967), “The Prisoner's Dilemma and Mutual Trust,” Ethics, 77:229–30. Stop Snitching campaign Rachael Woldoff and Karen G. Weiss (2010), “Stop Snitchin': Exploring Definitions of the Snitch and

The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success

by Kevin Dutton  · 15 Oct 2012  · 280pp  · 85,091 words

sentence of five years. And if neither confesses? Prison again, but this time for only a year. (See figure 3.3.) Figure 3.3. The Prisoner’s Dilemma This officer is smart. Think about it. He has, in effect, made you an offer you can’t refuse. The truth of the matter is

The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time

by Maria Konnikova  · 28 Jan 2016  · 384pp  · 118,572 words

Economic Dignity

by Gene Sperling  · 14 Sep 2020  · 667pp  · 149,811 words

Licence to be Bad

by Jonathan Aldred  · 5 Jun 2019  · 453pp  · 111,010 words

The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann

by Ananyo Bhattacharya  · 6 Oct 2021  · 476pp  · 121,460 words

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated)

by Charles Wheelan  · 18 Apr 2010  · 386pp  · 122,595 words

Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend

by Barbara Oakley Phd  · 20 Oct 2008

Complexity: A Guided Tour

by Melanie Mitchell  · 31 Mar 2009  · 524pp  · 120,182 words

Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection

by John T. Cacioppo  · 9 Aug 2009  · 327pp  · 97,720 words

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

by Daniel C. Dennett  · 15 Jan 1995  · 846pp  · 232,630 words

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor

by John Kay  · 24 May 2004  · 436pp  · 76 words

Strategy: A History

by Lawrence Freedman  · 31 Oct 2013  · 1,073pp  · 314,528 words

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution

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The Vortex: A True Story of History's Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation

by Scott Carney and Jason Miklian  · 28 Mar 2022  · 553pp  · 153,028 words

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

by Robert Wright  · 28 Dec 2010

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

by Iain McGilchrist  · 8 Oct 2012

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner  · 11 Apr 2005  · 339pp  · 95,988 words

Think Complexity

by Allen B. Downey  · 23 Feb 2012  · 247pp  · 43,430 words

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World

by Timothy Garton Ash  · 23 May 2016  · 743pp  · 201,651 words

Fifty Challenging Problems in Probability With Solutions

by Frederick Mosteller  · 15 May 1965

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths  · 4 Apr 2016  · 523pp  · 143,139 words

A Beautiful Mind

by Sylvia Nasar  · 11 Jun 1998  · 998pp  · 211,235 words

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities

by John Cassidy  · 10 Nov 2009  · 545pp  · 137,789 words

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

by Alice Schroeder  · 1 Sep 2008  · 1,336pp  · 415,037 words

Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

by Elinor Ostrom  · 29 Nov 1990

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky  · 1 May 2017  · 1,261pp  · 294,715 words

Clan Corporate

by Stross, Charles  · 28 Aug 2006  · 363pp  · 104,113 words

Libertarian Idea

by Jan Narveson  · 15 Dec 1988  · 371pp  · 36,271 words

The Selfish Gene

by Richard Dawkins  · 1 Jan 1976  · 365pp  · 117,713 words

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon

by Neil Sheehan  · 21 Sep 2009  · 589pp  · 197,971 words

Underground

by Suelette Dreyfus  · 1 Jan 2011  · 547pp  · 160,071 words

Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition

by Kindleberger, Charles P. and Robert Z., Aliber  · 9 Aug 2011

The Quantum Thief

by Hannu Rajaniemi  · 1 Jan 2010  · 324pp  · 91,653 words

Information: A Very Short Introduction

by Luciano Floridi  · 25 Feb 2010  · 137pp  · 36,231 words

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann  · 17 Jun 2019

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values

by Brian Christian  · 5 Oct 2020  · 625pp  · 167,349 words

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

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The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism

by Matt Mason

Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own

by Garett Jones  · 15 Feb 2015  · 247pp  · 64,986 words

Competition Demystified

by Bruce C. Greenwald  · 31 Aug 2016  · 482pp  · 125,973 words

The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time

by Yascha Mounk  · 26 Sep 2023

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

by Steven Pinker  · 14 Oct 2021  · 533pp  · 125,495 words

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

by Nate Silver  · 12 Aug 2024  · 848pp  · 227,015 words

The Rebel and the Kingdom: The True Story of the Secret Mission to Overthrow the North Korean Regime

by Bradley Hope  · 1 Nov 2022  · 257pp  · 77,612 words

SuperFreakonomics

by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner  · 19 Oct 2009  · 302pp  · 83,116 words

Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI

by John Cassidy  · 12 May 2025  · 774pp  · 238,244 words

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach

by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig  · 14 Jul 2019  · 2,466pp  · 668,761 words

Green Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson  · 23 Oct 1993  · 746pp  · 239,969 words

How the World Works

by Noam Chomsky, Arthur Naiman and David Barsamian  · 13 Sep 2011  · 489pp  · 111,305 words

Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World

by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg  · 15 Nov 2010  · 1,535pp  · 337,071 words

Rationality: From AI to Zombies

by Eliezer Yudkowsky  · 11 Mar 2015  · 1,737pp  · 491,616 words

More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded)

by Michael J. Mauboussin  · 1 Jan 2006  · 348pp  · 83,490 words

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet

by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, David Segal, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Laurie, Ron Paul, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Tiffiniy Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, Nicole Powers and Josh Levy  · 30 Apr 2013  · 452pp  · 134,502 words

Glasshouse

by Charles Stross  · 14 Jun 2006  · 443pp  · 123,526 words

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us

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Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition

by Charles Eisenstein  · 11 Jul 2011  · 448pp  · 142,946 words

Singularity Sky

by Stross, Charles  · 28 Oct 2003  · 448pp  · 116,962 words

Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-Like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You ... Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy

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The Despot's Accomplice: How the West Is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy

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The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy

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The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker  · 1 Jan 2002  · 901pp  · 234,905 words

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry

by Peter Warren Singer  · 1 Jan 2003  · 482pp  · 161,169 words

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future

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Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

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Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You

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The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

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The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life

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The Science of Hate: How Prejudice Becomes Hate and What We Can Do to Stop It

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How Democracies Die

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A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market

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How the Mind Works

by Steven Pinker  · 1 Jan 1997  · 913pp  · 265,787 words

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Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

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Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

by Richard H. Thaler  · 10 May 2015  · 500pp  · 145,005 words

Kiln People

by David Brin  · 15 Jan 2002  · 625pp  · 167,097 words

Red Plenty

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Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (And What We Can Do About It)

by William Poundstone  · 5 Feb 2008

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Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power

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Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street

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The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities

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Economists and the Powerful

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Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium

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The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest

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Fifty Degrees Below

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