As these opening quotes acknowledge, the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) represents a core puzzle within the formal mathematics of game theory.3 Its rise in conspicuity is evident figure 2.1 above demonstrating a relatively steady rise in incidences of the phrase’s usage between 1960 to 1995, with a stable presence persisting into the twenty first century. This famous two-person “game,” with a stock narrative cast in terms of two prisoners who each independently must choose whether to remain silent or speak, (...) each advancing self-interest at the expense of the other and thereby achieving a mutually suboptimal outcome, mires any social interaction it is applied to into perplexity. The logic of this game proves the inverse of Adam Smith’s invisible hand: individuals acting on self interest will achieve a mutually suboptimal outcome. However, as this chapter illuminates, the assumptions underlying game theory drive this conclusion. (shrink)

We make the case that the Prisoner’s Dilemma, notwithstanding its fame and the quantity of intellectual resources devoted to it, has largely failed to explain any phenomena of social scientific or biological interest. In the heart of the paper we examine in detail a famous purported example of Prisoner’s Dilemma empirical success, namely Axelrod’s analysis of WWI trench warfare, and argue that this success is greatly overstated. Further, we explain why this negative verdict is likely true (...) generally and not just in our case study. We also address some possible defenses of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. (shrink)

This paper explores the cooperation mechanisms for the prisoner’s dilemma game, a canonical example for studying cooperation mechanisms, with Bayesian games. By the approach allowing simultaneous moves with the assumption that the players might be self-interested or norm-following, we establish four possible Bayesian game models, all of which are cooperation mechanisms for the prisoner’s dilemma game except for the model in which one of the two players must be self-interested.

Prisoner's dilemmas can lead rational people to interact in ways that lead to persistent inefficiencies. These dilemmas create a problem for institutional designers to solve: devise institutions that realign individual incentives to achieve collectively rational outcomes. I will argue that we do not always want to eliminate misalignments between individual incentives and efficient outcomes. Sometimes we want to preserve prisoner's dilemmas, even when we know that they systematically will lead to inefficiencies. No doubt, prisoner's dilemmas can create problems, but they (...) also create opportunities to practice the cooperative norms that make market institutions possible in the first place. An ethical market culture, I argue, benefits from the presence of prisoner's dilemmas. I first consider standard approaches for solving prisoner's dilemmas. I then argue for the value of prisoner's dilemmas. Finally, I show the significance of this argument for advocating codes of business ethics. (shrink)

(1992). The prisoner's dilemma and educational provision: A reply to Ruth Jonathan. British Journal of Educational Studies: Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 118-133.

Prisoner's dilemmas can lead rational people to interact in ways that lead to persistent inefficiencies. These dilemmas create a problem for institutional designers to solve: devise institutions that realign individual incentives to achieve collectively rational outcomes. I will argue that we do not always want to eliminate misalignments between individual incentives and efficient outcomes. Sometimes we want to preserve prisoner's dilemmas, even when we know that they systematically will lead to inefficiencies. No doubt, prisoner's dilemmas can create problems, but they (...) also create opportunities to practice the cooperative norms that make market institutions possible in the first place. An ethical market culture, I argue, benefits from the presence of prisoner's dilemmas. I first consider standard approaches for solving prisoner's dilemmas. I then argue for the value of prisoner's dilemmas. Finally, I show the significance of this argument for advocating codes of business ethics. (shrink)

The Prisoner's Dilemma is a popular device used by researchers to analyze such institutions as business and the modern corporation. This popularity is not deserved under a certain condition that is widespread in college education. If we, as management educators, take seriously our parts in preparing our students to participate in the institutions of a democratic society, then the Prisoner's Dilemma—as clever a rhetorical device as it is—is an unacceptable means to that end. By posing certain questions about (...) the prisoners in the Prisoner's Dilemma, I show that management educators have created a Prisoners Dilemma, whereby they intellectually imprison themselves and their students by continuing to appeal to the Prisoner's Dilemma. These questions are not encouraged by the advocates of the Prisoner's Dilemma. (shrink)

The "Prisoner's Dilemma" game has been extensively discussed in both the public and academic press. Thousands of articles and many books have been written about this disturbing game and its apparent representation of many problems of society. The origin of the game is attributed to Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher. I quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Puzzles with this structure were devised and discussed by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher in 1950, as part of the Rand CorporationÂ’s (...) investigations into game theory (which Rand pursued because of possible applications to global nuclear strategy). The title "prisonerÂ’s dilemma" and the version with prison sentences as payoffs are due to Albert Tucker, who wanted to make Flood and DresherÂ’s ideas more accessible to an audience of Stanford psychologists. The Prisoner's Dilemma is a short parable about two prisoners who are individually offered a chance to rat on each other for which the "ratter" would receive a lighter sentence and the "rattee" would receive a harsher sentence. The problem results from the fact that both can play this game -- that is, defect -- and if both do, then both do worse than they would had they both kept silent. This peculiar parable serves as a model of cooperation between two or more individuals (or corporations or countries) in ordinary life in that in many cases each individual would be personally better off not cooperating (defecting) on the other. (shrink)

Several philosophers have discussed informal versions of a "symmetry argument" that seems to show that two rational maximizers will cooperate when they are in a prisoner's dilemma. I present a more precise version of that argument and I argue that it is valid only if some crucial statements are misinterpreted as material conditionals instead of being interpreted correctly as subjunctive conditionals.

Experiments in which subjects play simultaneously several finite two-person prisoner's dilemma supergames with and without an outside option reveal that: an attractive outside option enhances cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma game, if the payoff for mutual defection is negative, subjects' tendency to avoid losses leads them to cooperate; while this tendency makes them stick to mutual defection if its payoff is positive, subjects use probabilistic start and endeffect behavior.

n the spatialized Prisoner’s Dilemma, players compete against their immediate neighbors and adopt a neighbor’s strategy should it prove locally superior. Fields of strategies evolve in the manner of cellular automata (Nowak and May, 1993; Mar and St. Denis, 1993a,b; Grim 1995, 1996). Often a question arises as to what the eventual outcome of an initial spatial configuration of strategies will be: Will a single strategy prove triumphant in the sense of progressively conquering more and more territory without (...) opposition, or will an equilibrium of some small number of strategies emerge? Here it is shown, for finite configurations of Prisoner’s Dilemma strategies embedded in a given infinite background, that such questions are formally undecidable: there is no algorithm or effective procedure which, given a specification of a finite configuration, will in all cases tell us whether that configuration will or will not result in progressive conquest by a single strategy when embedded in the given field. The proof introduces undecidability into decision theory in three steps: by (1) outlining a class of abstract machines with familiar undecidability results, by (2) modelling these machines within a particular family of cellular automata, carrying over undecidability results for these, and finally by (3) showing that spatial configurationns of Prisoner’s Dilemma strategies will take the form of such cellular automata. (shrink)

Is game theory good for us? This may seem an odd question. In the strict sense, game theory—the axiomatic account of interaction between rational agents—is as morally neutral as arithmetic. But the popularization of game theory as a way of thinking about social interaction is far from neutral. Consider the contrast between characterizing bargaining over distribution as a “zero-sum society” and focussing on “win-win” cooperative solutions. These reflections bring us to the book under review, Prisoner's Dilemma, a popular introduction (...) to game theory and its relation to ethics by the respected science writer William Poundstone. The book begins with a moral dilemma and ends by discussing the evolution of co-operation. Poundstone emphasizes—correctly, to my mind—the ethical potential of game theory. He concludes his first chapter with this striking claim: “Today's practitioners of game theory are attempting to forge a kind of ethical progress. Is there any way to promote the common good in a prisoner's dilemma? The attempt to answer this question is one of the great intellectual adventures of our time”. (shrink)

According to David Lewis, the prisoner's dilemma (PD) and Newcomb's problem (NP) are really just one dilemma in two different forms (Lewis 1979). Lewis's argument for this conclusion is ingenious and has been widely accepted. However, it is flawed. As this paper shows, the considerations that Lewis brings to bear to show that the game he starts with is an NP equally show that the game is not a PD.

This article examines the prisoner's dilemma paradox and argues that confessing is the rational choice, despite this probably entailing a less-than-ideal outcome.

In a recent issue of this journal, C. L. Sheng claims to havesolved andexplained the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) by studying it ‘from a moral point of view’ - i.e., by assuming that each player feels sympathy for the other. Sheng does not fully clarify this claim, but there is textual evidence that his point is this: PD's arise only for agents who feel little or no sympathy for each other; they cannot arise in the presence of a high degree (...) of reciprocal sympathy. A high degree of such sympathysolves the PD in that it prevents PD's from arising, and a low degree of itexplains the PD in that it provides an essential condition for the occurrence of that game. This thesis is false, as some examples show. These examples are important; they prevent us from underestimating the problem posed by the PD. (shrink)

David Lewis argued that Newcomb’s Problem and the Prisoner’s Dilemma are “one and the same problem” or, to be more precise, that the Prisoner’s Dilemma is nothing else than “two Newcomb problems side by side” (Lewis Philosophy and Public Affairs 8:235–240, 1979 : 235). It has been objected that his argument fails to take into account certain epistemic asymmetries which undermine the one-problem thesis. Sobel ( 1985 ) acknowledges that many tokens satisfy the structural requirements of (...) both problems, while questioning the generality of the thesis. Bermúdez (Analysis 73:423–429, 2013 ), on the other hand, argues that there is a deeper structural conflict between the two problems in the sense that the epistemic requirements that give Newcomb’s Problem its force are precisely those that prevent it from being a Prisoner’s Dilemma. I argue that the epistemic asymmetry objections raised by Sobel and Bermúdez fail to undermine the one-problem thesis. A different type of objection raised by Bermúdez, one which relies on the contrast between parametric and strategic choices, fares no better. Although NP is a problem that has been primarily studied for its implications to decision theory, it contains enough game theoretic elements to justify the claim that a juxtaposition of two such problems can be thought of as a strategic game. (shrink)

Setting aside various foundational moral entanglements, I will offer an argument for the protection of intellectual property based on individual self-interest and prudence. In large part, this argument will parallel considerations that arise in a prisoner’s dilemma game. After sketching the salient features of a prisoner’s dilemma, I will briefly examine the nature of intellectual property and how one can view content creation, exclusion, and access as a prisoner’s dilemma. In brief, allowing content to (...) be unprotected in terms of free access leads to a sub-optimal outcome where creation and innovation are suppressed. Finally, I will argue that adopting the institutions of copyright, patent, and trade secret is one way we can avoid these sub-optimal results. (shrink)

I first argue against Peter Singer's exciting thesis that the Prisoner's Dilemma explains why there could be an evolutionary advantage in making reciprocal exchanges that are ultimately motivated by genuine altruism over making such exchanges on the basis of enlightened long-term self-interest. I then show that an alternative to Singer's thesis — one that is also meant to corroborate the view that natural selection favors genuine altruism, recently defended by Gregory Kavka, fails as well. Finally, I show that even (...) granting Singer's and Kavka's claim about the selective advantage of altruism proper, it is doubtful whether that type of claim can be used in a particular sort of sociobiological argument against psychological egoism. (shrink)

The iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma has become the standard model for the evolution of cooperative behavior within a community of egoistic agents, frequently cited for implications in both sociology and biology. Due primarily to the work of Axelrod (1980a, 198Ob, 1984, 1985), a strategy of tit for tat (TFT) has established a reputation as being particularly robust. Nowak and Sigmund (1992) have shown, however, that in a world of stochastic error or imperfect communication, it is not TFT that finally (...) triumphs in an ecological model based on population percentages (Axelrod and Hamilton 1981), but ‘generous tit for tat’ (GTFT), which repays cooperation with a probability of cooperation approaching 1 but forgives defection with a probability of l/3. In this paper, we consider a spatialized instantiation of the stochastic Prisoner’s Dilemma, using two-dimensional cellular automata (Wolfram, 1984, 1986; Gutowitz, 1990) to model the spatial dynamics of populations of competing strategies. The surprising result is that in the spatial model it is not GIFT but still more generous strategies that are favored. The optimal strategy within this spatial ecology appears to be a form of ‘bending over backwards’, which returns cooperation for defection with a probability of 2/3 - a rate twice as generous as GTFT. (shrink)

It is generally believed that, for a one-off Prisoner’s Dilemma game, it is logical to defect. However, both players cooperating is apparently a better choice than both defecting, hence the dilemma. In this paper, by resorting to Ramsey’s Test, Kripke’s possible world semantics, and Stalnaker/Lewis-style account of conditionals, I show that the first horn of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is an unsound argument. It originates from failing to differentiate between a possible world and a possible set (...) of possible worlds and failing to observe that the set of accessible possible worlds associated with a possible world in general varies from conditional to conditional. This phenomenon can also be illustrated in terms of the recently developed hi-world semantics. Moreover, a meta-argument is constructed to establish the non-existence of a logical argument for defection. (shrink)

The prisoner 's dilemma game has acquired large literatures in several disciplines. It is surprising, therefore, that a good definition of the game is hard to find. Typically an author relates a story about captured criminals or military rivals, provides a particular payoff matrix and asserts that the PD is characterized, or illustrated, by that matrix. In the few cases in which characterizing conditions are given, the conditions, and the motivations for them, do not always agree with each other (...) or with the paradigm examples elsewhere. In this paper we describe several varieties of PD's. In particular, we suggest there are two distinctions among PD's with philosophical significance, the pure/impure and the utilitarian/nonutilitarian distinctions. In the first section, we explain and characterize the two distinctions. In the second, we discuss an issue of moral philosophy that illustrates the significance of the former. (shrink)

"From the Proceedings of the British Academy, London, volume LXV (1979)" - title page. Series: Henrietta Hertz Trust annual philosophical lecture -- 1978 Other Titles: Proceedings of the British Academy. Vol.65: 1979.

Teaching economics has been shown to encourage students to defect in a prisoner's dilemma game. However, can ethics training reverse that effect and promote cooperation? We conducted an experiment to answer this question. We found that students who had the ethics module had higher rates of cooperation than students without the ethics module, even after controlling for communication and other factors expected to affect cooperation. We conclude that the teaching of ethics can mitigate the possible adverse incentives of the (...) prisoner's dilemma, and, by implication, the adverse effects of economics and business training. (shrink)

Schools of economic ethics inspired by Buchanan propose viewing ethical conflicts as prisoners’ dilemmas to facilitate solutions based on Pareto-improving institutional changes. Given that healthcare is determined by complex institutional arrangements, it has been claimed that this approach is also suitable for business ethics in healthcare. To scrutinize this claim, this research systematically searched for studies reporting PD structures in healthcare. PubMed, EconLit, and EconBiz were searched to find articles in German and English. Study type, characteristics of the game, and (...) the proposed means to overcome the dilemma were extracted and analyzed for aspects supporting or challenging the claim. Across 53 studies, 68 descriptions of various dilemmas in healthcare and public health were identified. Many authors successfully developed proposals for institutional change to overcome these dilemmas. However, many of these analyses exhibited limitations such as oversimplifications or inconsistencies. Also, the quality of evidence on both the characteristics of dilemmas and the effectiveness of proposed solutions was very poor. The subsamples of studies that explicitly cited the ethical approach were disjunct from those that applied empirical methods to analyze the dilemmas. The large number of identified PDs indicates that economic ethics is relevant to healthcare. However, there is a need for further evidence to substantiate both the descriptive and prescriptive claims of this ethical theory. It should thus be seen as a complement that needs justification, rather than a substitute superior to other ethical frameworks. (shrink)

Against the contention of David Lewis Philosophy and Public Affairs 8, 235–240, that the Prisoner’s Dilemma is a Newcomb Problem, José Luis Bermúdez Analysis 73, 423–429, has urged that Lewis’s assimilation removes the very outcome scenarios that make the Dilemma so puzzling. I objected that this criticism of Lewis presupposes that the Dilemma is harder to resolve than Newcomb’s Problem, in effect challenging Bermúdez to justify this assumption. In his 2015 he takes up the challenge, arguing (...) that while the former presents a problem of strategic choice the latter is problem of parametric choice. I argue here that appeal to the distinction between these two kinds of choice cannot sustain the rejection of Lewis’s view. (shrink)

Aside from making a few weak, and hopefully widely shared claims about the value of privacy, transparency, and accountability, we will offer an argument for the protection of privacy based on individual self-interest and prudence. In large part, this argument will parallel considerations that arise in a prisoner’s dilemma game. After briefly sketching an account of the value of privacy, transparency, and accountability, along with the salient features of a prisoner’s dilemma games, a game-theory analysis will (...) be offered. In a game where both players want privacy and to avoid transparency and the associated accountability, the dominant action will be to foist accountability and transparency on the other player while attempting to retain one’s own privacy. Simply put, if both players have the ability or power to make the other more accountable and transparent, they will do so for the same reasons that player’s defect in a prisoner’s dilemma game. Ultimately this will lead to a sub-optimal outcome of too much accountability and transparency. While there are several plausible solutions to prisoner dilemma games, we will offer both technical, as well as, law and policy solutions. We need to change the payoffs of the game so that is it in everyone’s interest to balance privacy and accountability rather than foisting transparency on others. (shrink)

Maximizers in isolated Prisoner's Dilemmas are doomed to frustration. But in Braybrooke's view maximizers might do better in a series, securing Pareto-optimal arrangements if not from the very beginning, at least eventually. Given certain favourable special conditions, it can be shown according to Braybrooke and shown even without question-begging motivational or value assumptions, that in a series of Dilemmas maximizers could manage to communicate a readiness to reciprocate, generate thereby expectations of reciprocation, and so give rise to optimizing reciprocations which, (...) in due course, would reinforce expectations, the net result of all this being an increasingly stable practice to mutual benefit. In this way neighbours could learn to be good neighbours: they could learn to respect each other's property, to engage in reciprocal assistance, and perhaps even to make and keep promises covering a range of activities. So maximizers are, Braybrooke holds, capable of a society of sorts. Out of the ashes they might build something. But even under favourable conditions they could not build much and most conditions would defeat them almost entirely, for many-person Dilemmas whether isolated or in series would be quite beyond them, question-begging motivational assumptions aside. In settings at all like those in which we live, utility maximization assuming only ‘traditional’ motivation is self-defeating without remedy, and most certainly not an adequate basis for social life.' The probable inference from as a conception of individual rationality: for surely truly rational agents would be if not perfectly well designed at least better designed for communal living than utility maximizers would be assuming only ‘traditional’, non-question-begging values or motivation. Or, if this inference is denied and maximization is not challenged as a conception of rationality, we can conclude instead, Braybrooke has more recently suggested, that the advice, ‘Be rational,’ is incomplete, and when addressed to groups should be supplemented by, ‘And be somewhat ‘untraditional’ in your values; respect at least some rules that would make coordination and cooperation possible even in many-person interaction problems.’. (shrink)

The study explores the impact of robots’ emotional displays on people’s tendency to cooperate with a robot opponent in prisoner’s dilemma games. Participants played iterated prisoner’s dilemma games with a non-expressive robot (as a measure of cooperative baseline), followed by an angry, and a sad robot, in turn. Based on the Emotion as Social Information model, we expected participants with higher cooperative predispositions to cooperate less when a robot displayed anger, and cooperate more when the robot (...) displayed sadness. Contrarily, according to this model, participants with lower cooperative predispositions should cooperate more with an angry robot and less with a sad robot. The results of 60 participants failed to support the predictions. Only the participants’ cooperative predispositions significantly predicted their cooperative tendencies during gameplay. Participants who cooperated more in the baseline measure also cooperated more with the robots displaying sadness and anger. In exploratory analyses, we found that participants who accurately recognised the robots’ sad and angry displays tended to cooperate less with them overall. The study highlights the impact of personal factors in human–robot cooperation, and how these factors might surpass the influence of bottom-up emotional displays by the robots in the present experimental scenario. (shrink)

I want to show the importance of the notion of conatus for Hobbes' political philosophy. According to Hobbes, all motion of bodies consists of elementary motions he called 'endeavors.' They are motions 'made in less space and time than can be given,' and they obey the law of persistence or inertia. A body strives to preserve its state and resist the causal power of other bodies. I call this the conatus-principle. Hobbes' argument for social contract and sovereign is based essentially (...) on this model. He proves that the natural conatus makes people strive to preserve their lives and therefore to get out of the destructive state of nature; commit to mutual contracts; keep the contracts unless some external cause otherwise determines; and establish a permanent sovereign power that Hobbes calls 'an artificial eternity of life.' All this is determined by the fundamental laws of nature, essentially, by the conatus-principle. I also show that the Prisoner's Dilemma interpretation of the Hobbesian state of nature does not represent all of the essential features of Hobbes' argument. (shrink)

A version of this paper was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence, combined meeting of ICNN, FUZZ-IEEE, and ICEC, Orlando, June-July, 1994, and an earlier form of the result is to appear as "The Undecidability of the Spatialized Prisoner's Dilemma" in Theory and Decision . An interactive form of the paper, in which figures are called up as evolving arrays of cellular automata, is available on DOS disk as Research Report #94-04i . An expanded version appears (...) as chapter 6 of The Philosophical Computer. (shrink)

In the spatialized Prisoner's Dilemma, players compete against their immediate neighbors and adopt a neighbor's strategy should it prove locally superior. Fields of strategies evolve in the manner of cellular automata (Nowak and May, 1993; Mar and St. Denis, 1993a,b; Grim 1995, 1996). Often a question arises as to what the eventual outcome of an initial spatial configuration of strategies will be: Will a single strategy prove triumphant in the sense of progressively conquering more and more territory without opposition, (...) or will an equilibrium of some small number of strategies emerge? Here it is shown, for finite configurations of Prisoner's Dilemma strategies embedded in a given infinite background, that such questions are formally undecidable: there is no algorithm or effective procedure which, given a specification of a finite configuration, will in all cases tell us whether that configuration will or will not result in progressive conquest by a single strategy when embedded in the given field. The proof introduces undecidability into decision theory in three steps: by (1) outlining a class of abstract machines with familiar undecidability results, by (2) modelling these machines within a particular family of cellular automata, carrying over undecidability results for these, and finally by (3) showing that spatial configurations of Prisoner's Dilemma strategies will take the form of such cellular automata. (shrink)

Hobbes postulates a social contract to formalize our collective transition from the state of nature to civil society. The prisoner’s dilemma challenges both the mechanics and the outcome of that thought experiment. The incentives for reneging are supposedly strong enough to keep rational persons from cooperating. This paper argues that the prisoner’s dilemma undermines a position Hobbes does not hold. The context and parameters of the social contract steer it safely between the horns of the (...) class='Hi'>dilemma. Specifically, in a setting as hostile as the state of nature, Hobbes’s emphasis on self-interest places a premium on survival, and thereby on adaptability, which then promotes progressive concessions toward peaceful coexistence. This transforms the relevant model of rationality from utility maximization to utility satisficing, thus favoring the pursuit of a mutually satisfactory outcome over that of the best personal outcome. The difference not only obviates the prisoner’s dilemma but also better approximates the state of nature while leaving a viable way out. (shrink)

Mealey's interesting interpretation of sociopathy is based on an inappropriate two-person game model. A multiperson, compound game version of Chicken would be more suitable, because a population engaging in random pairwise interactions with that structure would evolve to an equilibrium in which a fixed proportion of strategic choices was exploitative, antisocial, and risky, as required by Mealey's interpretation.

Evolutionary applications of game theory present one of the most pedagogically accessible varieties of genuine, contemporary theoretical biology. We present here Oyun (OY-oon, http://charlespence.net/oyun), a program designed to run iterated prisoner’s dilemma tournaments, competitions between prisoner’s dilemma strategies developed by the students themselves. Using this software, students are able to readily design and tweak their own strategies, and to see how they fare both in round-robin tournaments and in “evolutionary” tournaments, where the scores in a given (...) “generation” directly determine contribution to the population in the next generation. Oyun is freely available, runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, and the process of creating new prisoner’s dilemma strategies is both easy to teach and easy for students to grasp. We illustrate with two interesting examples taken from actual use of Oyun in the classroom. (shrink)

There are two curious features about the backward induction argument (BIA) to the effect that repeated non-cooperation is the rational solution to the finite iterated prisoner’s dilemma (FIPD). First, however compelling the argument may seem, one remains hesitant either to recommend this solu- tion to players who are about to engage in cooperation or to explain cooperation as a deviation from rational play in real-life FIPD’s. Second, there seems to be a similarity between the BIA for the FIPD (...) and the surprise exam paradox (SEP) and one cannot help but wonder whether the former is indeed no more than an instance of the latter. I argue that there is an important difference between the BIA for the FIPD and the SEP, but that a comparison to the SEP can help us understand why the conclusion of the BIA for the FIPD strikes us as a counterintuitive solution to real-life FIPD’s. (shrink)

Many recent studies of norm emergence employ the "prisoner's dilemma" (PD) paradigm, which focuses on the free-rider problem that can block the cooperation required for the emergence of social norms. This paper proposes an expansion of the PD paradigm to include a closely related game termed the "altruist's dilemma" (AD). Whereas egoistic behavior in the PD leads to collectively irrational outcomes, the opposite is the case in the AD: altruistic behavior (e.g., following the Golden Rule) leads to collectively (...) irrational outcomes, whereas egoistic behavior leads to Pareto-optimal outcomes. The analysis shows that PDs can be converted into ADs either by increasing cooperation costs or by diminishing marginal gains from cooperation; therefore ADs are as empirically abundant as PDs. In addition, the analysis shows that altruists are not the only type of actors who fall prey to the AD; egoists can fall into this trap as well if they possess a capacity for interpersonal control. Where group solidarity is defined analytically in terms of the extent of cooperation in both PDs and ADs, this paper presents a model based on rational choice to account for variations in solidarity. According to the proposed analysis, levels of group solidarity depend on the balance in the group between compliant control, which increases cooperation, and oppositional control, which reduces it. That balance, in turn, depends on the allocation of power within the group. (shrink)