Republican Candidates’ Prisoner’s Dilemmas
http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/24/politics/ted-cruz-john-kasich-join-forces-to-stop-donald-trump/
The article is about then Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz and John Kasich’s decision to join forces in the president race in attempt to overtake Donald Trump. Although they were the second and third place candidates, they knew that they would not be able to individually pull enough delegates to become the GOP nomination. With each candidate focusing on all the states before, they decided to combine forces to hopefully gain popularity. Looking at the numbers, there was a large enough group of Anti-Trump supporters such that there was a chance of taking the lead. However, when they ran separately, Cruz and Kasich were splitting the votes and thus taking away from their main objective. Recently, they decided to forgo fighting for the same states and focus on different ones. For example, because Cruz had been heavily focusing on gathering the votes from Indiana at the time, Kasich decided to pull himself out of Indiana to allow all Cruz to overtake Trump in that state. Similarly, Cruz is backing away from New Mexico and Oregon, two states that Kasich has been heavily campaigning in.
This situation is very similar to a prisoner’s dilemma. We can look at Ted Cruz as player one of the game and John Kasich as player two. If they both choose to run completely independently and both were equally popular, they would split the votes for all states, significantly lowering either of their chances of winning the state over Trump. If either player was a clear favorite in the state but the other still ran, then some of the votes are still taken away from the winner. For example, in Indiana, if Kasich had not backed out of the state, some of the votes would’ve went to him instead of Cruz. Those votes could’ve been the determining factor of whether Cruz or Trump won the state. Lastly, if players decide to collude as they did now, they would each monopolize the Anti-Trump votes of the states they were favorites for anyway. Although this is not a perfect prisoner’s dilemma, the idea was very similar: two parties working together to achieve a common goal and for optimal results. Both parties were trying to reach the point of Nash Equilibrium.
In addition, by working together, Cruz, Kasich formed a balanced triadic network. The connection between the two of them would be a positive relationship while from each Cruz and Kasich to Trump would be negative relationship. Two negatives and a positive in the network balances out.