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CIAO DATE: 9/5/2006
The Dilemma of the Prisoners' Dilemmas
Daniel Arce
February 2005
Center for International Studies University of Southern California
Abstract
In a variety of social, economic, and political situations, the Prisoners’ Dilemma (PD) game is the most studied of the 78 distinct binary games. When characterizing Olson’s (1965) analysis of collective action, Russell Hardin (1982, Chapter 2) goes so far as equating all collective action problems to Prisoners’ Dilemmas. Although a variety of game forms are now associated with collective action problems (Sandler 1992), there is no question that the PD game occupies a central place in the analysis of diverse social science phenomena. PD games are used to investigate arms races, treaty adherence, the tragedy of the commons, counterterrorism, logrolling, public good provision, altruism, boycotts, and many other issues.
With a few notable exceptions, PD games are applied in a generic fashion as though all PD games possess identical strategic implications. For binary strategies, researchers draw little differences among two-player and n-player PD games in a host of different social scenarios. The ordinal representation, where payoffs are rank ordered, is often stressed, thereby hiding some of the essential strategic aspects that differentiate PD games. To date, the importance between action and inaction is masked by focusing on cooperate and defect; yet, alternative PD games differ based on the dominance of action versus inaction. The cooperate and defect strategies may involve action or inaction depending on the underlying PD game; the action/inaction distinction better informs policy. Finally, the typical representations of PD games do not distinguish between public and private benefits versus public and private costs that are associated with the underlying strategies. These distinctions are essential in truly understanding the strategic implications of alternative PD games.
