Evolution of Prisoners Dilemma
In a TED talk in 2005, a speaker Howard Rheingold spoke on the idea of collective action. He goes on to describe the “Tragedy of the Commons,” the idea that given a large, open source resource, humans will undoubtedly exploit it for their own gain, effectively ruining their resources. This comes from the idea of a common pasture, where each farmer, looking to maximize his own flock, depletes the field of any usable grass. This situation is really is a large prisoner’s dilemma game, and when tested again and again, it was found to be true, as people followed their own rational self-interest.
This fact, however, is starting to change. Sometimes these areas of common resources actually work, when people work to create collective action institutions where “rational self-interest is not always the dominating factor.”
A movement has started of new economic forms, where companies ranging from technology giants to car manufacturers work to open source their resources, either by releasing their software or patents, or by training their merchandisers to do better, even to the aid of their own competitors. The idea that it is better to share has worked together with the motivation of self-interest as companies realize that they can enrich themselves by enriching others. Cheaters of this system are penalized, and this form of “altruistic punishment” enables societies to come together.
Through this process, companies such as Amazon and Google prosper with open forums and feedback mechanisms, essentially eliminating the prisoner’s dilemma game. By giving options for people to prove they can be trusted, “sub-optimal moves” are eliminated. This directly ties in with the introduction of prisoner’s dilemma in class, where at first glance the ideal move seems to be for everyone to not confess. We then learned that the actual best move would be to confess, because it takes into account that you don’t know whether the other person will confess or not, so this is your optimal strategy for any move.
With these new methods of cooperation, however, you do know the other move. A new way thinking is created, making better opportunities for optimization and improvement for larger groups of people across the map.
Source: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/howard_rheingold_on_collaboration.html
-Enron[e]