• A prisoner’s dilemma is a situation where individual decision makers always have an incentive to make choices in a way that results in a less than optimal outcome for individuals as a group.

  • Prisoner’s dilemmas arise in many aspects of economics.
  • In the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma, people benefit most if they betray the group rather than cooperate.
  • If the games are repeated, each player can develop a strategy that encourages cooperation.
  • People have developed a variety of methods to overcome the prisoner’s dilemma in order to select the best collective outcomes despite apparently adverse individual incentives.