Cooperation

Deeply Personal Current: Co-op Games Can Save Your Relationship Analysis Paralysis All Posts Next Co-op Games Can Save Your Relationship (Or Ruin It) My wife and I play video games together. ...

Repeated Games: How Cooperation Emerges from Self-Interest In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, rational players defect. In the Tragedy of the Commons, rational actors destroy shared resources. One-shot game theory seems to paint a bleak picture: selfishness always wins. But real life isn’t a series of one-shot games. We interact with the same people, companies, and countries repeatedly. And this changes everything. Welcome to repeated games — where cooperation emerges not from altruism, but from enlightened self-interest. ...

Imagine you and a partner are arrested for a crime. The police separate you into different rooms and offer each of you the same deal. You can’t communicate. You don’t know what your partner will do. And the choice you make will determine whether you go free or spend years in prison. Welcome to the most famous problem in game theory: the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It reveals a disturbing truth about rational decision-making that explains everything from climate change to price wars to why your office kitchen is always dirty. ...