Introduction
The prisoner’s dilemma paradigm was first created in 1950 by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher, employees of the RAND Corporation, a think tank dedicated in part to performing strategic studies on the potential outcomes of an intercontinental nuclear war (Poundstone 1993). The paradigm was used as a way to illuminate the potential outcomes of a preemptive nuclear strike made by either side in a war or the optimal decisions in that context, assuming no communication with the other side. Flood and Dresher introduced the model to Albert Tucker, who came up with the prisoner analogy to make the game easier to explain: Imagine that two criminals are captured and brought in for interrogation. There is enough evidence to incriminate them, but a witness confession from one prisoner would make the case for conviction of the other prisoner much easier. The prisoners are thus separated, and each prisoner is offered a deal. Specifically, each prisoner is told that if he defects from...
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Hines, B., Rios, K. (2019). Prisoner’s Dilemma Game. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1892-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1892-1
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