POLS1002 Chapter Notes - Chapter 3: Coordination Game, Mutual Assured Destruction, Stag Hunt
Cooperation and Conflict
COLOMER ‘The Science of Politics’ – Ch 3
THE PRISONER’S DILEMMA
• Game theory studies human decisions in situations in which one’s decision depends on
expectations as to what others will do
• In a strategic situation requiring collective action, each actor must decide whether to
cooperate – to participate in the common action for the common benefit or to compete –
to seek his own benefit
• Other actor’s response to the decision impact every other actor as cooperation and defection
can change the collective outcome
• In game theory, different types of interactions are distinguished (especially the following):
- Coordination games –these imply easy cooperation among people with strongly
shared interests to produce common benefit
- Conflict or zero-sum games – in contrast to coordination games, these include
strong competition in which gains for some participants imply losses for the others
- Non-zero-sum games – falling in between coordination and conflict games, these are
games in which the outcome is undetermined, whether in favor of cooperation or
conflict, although mutual cooperation can produce gains for all participants
Cooperate and defect
• Prisoner’s Dilemma – an inefficient outcome in which nobody cooperates
- Provides insight into the problem of collective action
- The inefficient outcome of this dilemma is a representation of the free-rider problem
• Dominant strategy – a decision resulting in a better outcome for him regardless of the other
actor’s decision
• The Nash-equilibrium – an outcome from which no actor has incentives to move away by
changing his strategy unilaterally
• Cooperative agreement to the actors’ mutual benefit is more likely to be reached in a small
group with direct interactions
• In contrast, in a large group with various actors – the chance of obtaining positive responses
from the other actors and of dissuading them from defecting is minimal
Other Political Dilemmas
• Closer interactions between actors on problems involving high stakes can result in conditional
cooperation and agreeable, more satisfactory outcomes
Community
• If human interactions are unconstrained, anybody with the advantage of surprise can try to
impose his will on the others
Democratization
• Institutions of institutional regime crises in which authoritarian rulers cannot go on as they
have been accustomed to, actors with opposite political regime preferences can generate
violence conflict or a civil war in which each side may fight to eliminate each other –
represented by the inefficient outcome in the Prisoner’s Dilemma
Deterrence
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