The Prisoner’s Dilemma and the COVID-19 Pandemic
This article takes a really interesting approach to analyzing the decisions of our society throughout the pandemic. Using a utilitarian scope, it examines how our behaviors are modeled by the prisoner’s dilemma game. While everyone should be trying to do the best they can to produce the greatest good for the majority of people, people are more frequently doing what is best for themselves, or what creates the greatest individual payoff. The prisoner’s dilemma game is a scenario where the players compete against each other with strategies that rely on either cooperation or betrayal in order to receive this payoff. During the pandemic, people could either cooperate by partaking in activities like washing their hands, wearing a mask, and getting vaccinated, or they could betray society by not doing these things and subsequently contributing to the spread of COVID-19. This raises the question of what qualifies as a payoff in this context. Is it self-happiness? Is it a low infection rate? Is it some sort of in between? In an ethical community utilizing the utilitarian scope that this article was, it could be whatever is healthiest for the most amount of people. Contrasting to the typical use of game theory, people should be attempting to create the greatest collective payoff rather than finding their individual Nash Equilibrium.
This use of the prisoner’s dilemma is a very different application than what was used in class. The example we were taught about relied on only two players who were making decisions that only had impacts on themselves and had very obvious payoffs. It was clear that less jail time was the better option. In respect to the pandemic, using the prisoner’s dilemma becomes much more complex as there is a huge number of players and an unclear form of what qualifies as a payoff.
source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/20/health/virus-vaccine-game-theory.html