Prisoner’s Dilemma Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

In political science, one of the most popular game theory tools, the prisoner’s dilemma, is a nonzero-sum game in which two suspects of a crime are arrested and each given the option of either accusing the other prisoner—defect, in game theory jargon—or stay silent—cooperate. Jail terms attach to the four resulting combinations such that each player’s order of preferences is: unilateral defection (DC) > mutual cooperation (CC) > mutual defection (DD) > unilateral cooperation (CD).This configuration makes defection the dominant strategy for both players.

The prisoner’s dilemma describes and analyzes strategic political interactions characterized by the relative payoff structure, and its peculiarity is that the Nash equilibrium solution, DD, is a Pareto-inefficient point, as all players would be better-off if they could move to the unstable solution, CC. Put differently, this game illustrates domestic or international situations in which reciprocal cooperation is advantageous for all actors involved, but it is nonetheless difficult to achieve because of the incentives at work. Examples include disarmament, trade wars, and the provision of public goods.

Given the problematic nature of the prisoner’s dilemma, political scientists have devoted much effort to studying the conditions under which stable cooperation is possible. Two of these are the intervention of a superimposed enforcing agency, such as the state, or the infinite, or indefinite, iteration of the game.

Bibliography:

Axelrod, Robert. The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

Dixit, Avinash and Susan Skeath. Games of Strategy. 2nd ed. New York:W.W. Norton, 2004.

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