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Part II
Chapter 4: resolving the prisoner’s dilemma book of think strategically
Prisoner’s dilemma’s remarkable feature is that both sides play their dominant strategy, thus maximize their payoff, and yet the outcome is jointly worse than if both followed the strategy of minimizing their payoff.
Reflection:
1. How to achieve cooperation?
These who find themselves in a prisoner’s dilemma will look for ways to escape and achieve the cooperative outcome they jointly prefer. Others may like to see the players remain trapped in the dilemma. Whether we seek collusion or its opposite, we must understand the ways in which the prisoner’s dilemma might be averted. Then we can try to facilitate these ways or to block them as is appropriate in the case being considered. The underlying problem is the player’s incentive to cheat on any agreement. Therefore the central questions are, how can such cheating be detected? What prospect of punishment will deter it?
2. Detection cheating
Example, for cartel, a compromise solution is a critical or trigger price; if the price falls below this value, the cartel presume that cheating has occurred and the punishment ensues. Therefore a cartel that tries to enforce collusive high price finds competition continually breaking out in new dimensions. Example. Another instance of this process occurred in the area of in international trade policy. Tariffs are the most visible for restricting trade, and successive rounds of negotiations of the general agreement on Tariffs and Trades ( GATT) achieved large mutual reductions of tariff rates of all industrial countries. But each country still had its domestic political pressures from powerful special interests to restrict imports. Therefore countries gradually switched to other, less visible means, such as voluntary restraint agreements, customers valuation procedure, standards, administrative practices and complicated quotas. The common theme of these examples is that collusion focuses on the more transparent dimensions of choice and competition shifts to the less observable ones: we call this the law of increase Opaqueness. Opaque competition was doubly bad: price were higher and the balance of the product mix was distorted. Identifying the cheating may be even more difficult than detecting cheating. With just two players, an honest party knows that the other has cheated. There may still a problem with getting him to admit his fault. With more than two players, we may know that someone has cheated, but no one ( other than the cheater) knows who. In this case, the punishment to deter cheating must be blunt and affect the innocent and guilty alike. Finally the cheating may consist of remaining passive and may thereby be difficult to isolate.