I found this reading really interesting as it covers dilemmas and issues, I’ve seen in previous classes such as Intro to International Relations and Leadership and Social Sciences. These dilemmas have been particularly problematic on the world stage, and during the Cold War led us to the brink of nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, they do have one critical weakness: they rely on a lack of accountability and communication. Once you establish these two factors in the system, their power rapidly declines. For example, in the prisoner’s dilemma if they agree on backstories ahead of time, communicate through lawyers, and have someone on the outside who can punish either of them for talking, the effectiveness of the prisoner’s dilemma effectively disappears. This is one of the reasons international institutions like the UN are incredibly valuable, as they establish this accountability and communication on the world stage.

While I have learned about Game Theory in several of my classes in my collegiate career (environmental studies, microeconomics, leadership, and social sciences, and several other courses) this text refreshed my memory and introduced me to new and interesting situations in Game Theory.

The “Free Rider” scenario had completely slipped my mind and I am still unsure how to feel about the situation. The text described a situation where one member of a neighborhood rents a large dumpster for their own personal use and then multiple other members of the neighborhood put their small garbage into the dumpster; there is still plenty of room for the personal use of the member who rented the dumpster. They explain that this becomes a problem when the whole neighborhood utilizes the communal resource of the dumpster, to the point where there is not enough room for the member who rented it. The reason this scenario is a tough one for me to grasp is that when people do not take complete advantage of a situation and it isn’t a functional problem for the dumpster owner then it makes plenty of sence- especially when you think of the alternatives like littering and that dumpster space being left unused. It makes me wonder if there were any characteristics or circumstances where the free-rider situation could be mutually beneficial. The text mentioned how the free rider scenario applies to credit card fraud. I personally do not completely understand this example and would like to as it is a prominent issue in the world today.

Chicken and Nash’s Equilibrium:

I watched the film, Beautiful Mind for the first time about two years ago in my IB Psychology class. The film depicts Nash’s moment of epitome when he is at a grad school bar with a group of other graduate students and he visualizes the scenario. This is how I have always thought of the Nash Equilibrium as I ama very visual person. In economics, the Nash Equilibrium makes a lot of sense to me when you think about the guarantee of every party benefiting in some way. Yet, I never thought about the Nash Equilibrium in the context of War as mentioned in the text.

I thought that the volunteer’s dilemma was the most interesting part of the reading. I had heard about almost every other theory except for this one. Once I read about it, I immediately thought of multiple examples of this within my daily life. The first example that came to mind was interactions with my siblings. If my parents are not home for the day, usually they will leave us a list of things to do like dishes, laundry, taking the dog out, etc. But they do not specify who should do each task, yet they expect that the tasks be done by the time they get home. Usually my siblings and I will look at each other and hope that someone steps up to do it. We usually end up waiting until the last minute because we keep waiting for one of us to do the tasks until someone “takes one for the team” and does it (this usually ends up being my brother, who is the youngest). I never realized that this was a coordination/cooperation problem until reading about the volunteer’s dilemma. From now on, I am going to try and employ some of the answers/solutions in the reading to see if these issues diminish.

This reading also helped me realized that compromise is really inevitable. Sometimes, we just have to accept the “lower utility” value or the option that will not always totally maximize our well being. This is a sacrifice that we made, since we live in a society that is structured around compromise and communication. Furthermore, it can not always be the same person who is making the sacrifice. If one person always acquires the sacrifice, then it damages the credibility of the other people who do not sacrifice. People will be less willing to compromise/communicate with those people and therefore, we will incur more problems down the line. As a result, it is important that we all sacrifice and not free ride in order to maximize our utility in the long run and not just the short run.

I’ve read this book and learned about game theory in the past, so I feel pretty familiar with the subject matter. One thing that I think is so cool about game theory is how universally applicable it is — the concepts and situations appear in every single instance of human interaction. One of these situations tends to come up in almost every single one of my classes since freshman year. One point that RPS made was that all four situations are essentially the same thing because the cooperative solution is never the default despite being the best possible outcome. Thinking about why this takes place, I feel like a lot of people cite the reason that people are inherently selfish so you can never act under the assumption that another person will look out for you. I am less pessimistic and think that educating people on the situation and telling them about game theory and the factors at play will make someone understand that they are operating on incorrect assumptions that they should not be using.

I had heard of some of these social dilemmas before, but I had heard them outside of game theory. I learned about the Tragedy of the Commons in a high school environmental science class because it relates to overfishing, and I learned about the Prisoner’s Dilemma in Econ. (Although somehow this book explained it better than a whole semester of Econ.) I knew of the concept of Chicken because it was a game we played at recess in elementary school, where two people would hang from the monkey bars and kick at each other until one gave up and jumped off.

It’s interesting that dilemmas like these can apply to very small situations, like a roommate not doing the dishes and getting their frustrated roommates to do it for them, or to large scale situations, like thousands of young people free riding on social welfare. Whatever the scale, the solutions seem to apply either way, like threats vs negotiation. Since we can recognize these dilemmas, I think it would be valuable to know ways in which to nullify these situations, especially since all of us are in a setting where we often have to work collaboratively with people, and will likely need to do so when we first get jobs or internships.

I have learned about game theory before in some of my past classes, but this reading gave some unique examples of how game theory can apply to our everyday lives.  It really made me think about larger and smaller-scale situations and everyday encounters in which I use game theory.  I do usually cooperate in group settings and do what’s best for everyone because I have been on the losing side of uncooperative group behaviors before, and feel bad when I cause others a disadvantage.  However, that is not to say I practice this behavior all the time.  I definitely have found myself in a free-rider situation before, like when someone offers to pay for our uber and I don’t fight them too hard on the decision since I want the uber ride but not the cost that comes with it.  I think the only time I’ve found myself in the Chicken dilemma is when I would fight with my siblings when I was younger, but otherwise, I’m not a very competitive person and usually give in too soon to make the group happy.  I have definitely found myself in the Battle of the Sexes dilemma, for example when going out to eat with friends, I want to go eat with them more than I want to go to a specific restaurant, so we spend way longer than we should trying to make a decision on where to eat.  I have also found myself in the volunteer’s dilemma when I was younger and my parents would ask for either me or my siblings to complete a chore and if no one volunteered then we got a punishment.  When I was younger I would usually volunteer since I knew my siblings wouldn’t but as I got older I stopped doing so and made one of them volunteer because I felt that I had given in enough over the years.  I usually don’t think of game theory dilemmas in terms of my everyday life, but realizing how often I am placed in these types of situations made the reading seem a lot more relevant and interesting to me.

I have taken a lot of Environmental Studies so far at Richmond and the Tragedy of the Commons and Free Rider problem always come up in those classes. As noted in the reading, these problems are so relevant to our current climate crisis. Everyone thinks that their single action will not have a seriously negative impact but overtime if everyone thinks that way these negative actions multiply and end up having serious consequences. One person using plastic products all the time would not be a big deal if most other people chose to only use reusable products but that is certainly not the case. Everyone puts the responsibility to be environmentally conscious on other people’s shoulders to the point that there are only a few people that are actually environmentally conscious and everyone else is escaping responsibility. Additionally, there is tremendous profit to be gained by being the corporation that chooses not to be environmentally conscious at all. Individual people and large corporations can only benefit this way for so long before we have environmental consequences that harm all people and nobody is benefiting.

A lot of the reading had me think that humans are just selfish and completely irrational. It was almost sad to see how many of the problems outlined in the reading could be solved if we just communicated with each other and acted more rationally. People are always trying to ensure the most benefits for themselves even if that means taking on a lot more risks than they need to. If we just thought things through more and acted less selfishly we would determine that there are solutions that are a lot easier and mutually beneficial. I can understand that in certain business situations this may not be practical but in most everyday situations it is very practical.

I’m kind of a fan of game theory. I remember first learning about Prisoner’s Dilemma when reading “The Mysterious Benedict Society” when I was younger and then learning about a few of the other dilemmas during my Intro to Comparative Politics course freshman year. Each time I hear more about it, I find the new information fascinating. From this reading, I had never heard of Chicken or Stag Hunt.

In learning about Prisoner’s Dilemma, I have always thought that I would be the person to choose the cooperative option. I would rather believe that the other person would also choose the cooperative option rather than choosing the cheating option and possibly getting stuck with the extra years or screwing over the other person. However, as the options are presented in the model dilemma, I do not know if I would choose the cooperative option in the Stag Hunt because I would be worried about the possibility of the both of us not catching the stag and being stuck with nothing given the higher levels of risk in Stag Hunt. However, when the stacks were changed to the freedom of speech in Tibet, I completely understood (and agreed with) why people would choose to chase the stag. I think that it is interesting how my thought of what I would do changes between the model and the example. It shows how important context is, especially when discussing game theory and the actions you would take in the situations.

I honestly thought that this reading was boring. I didn’t find it super engaging but it did make me think a lot about compromise. It talked a lot about finding the Nash equilibrium and how both parties have to want similar things. I think this ties in a lot with the idea of compromise. Is the idea situation one where everyone is happy or where no one is happy. I think that the answer is when no one is happy. It’s nice to think that humans are able to find solutions that make everyone happy but we are just not. It’s not in our nature, especially on a large scale. I believe that when people are actually compromising they are giving up things on both sides. This is very important for things like politics and stuff because people need to be willing to give up some things to achieve anything. I think this is why rock paper scissors makes us so happy. It makes us feel like anyone can win and has a fair shot at winning. It makes us feel like we are not losing even though there is a 50% chance that we don’t get what we want.

I found this reading to be really interesting. I am familiar with the Prisoners Dilemma scenario from my Econ and Poly-Sci classes, but was less familiar with the other ‘deadly dilemmas.’ I really liked how the author started off by stating that while there are various dilemmas, they all lead to the same non-optimal ending if the members cannot trust one another. While in theory, these issues seem so easy to irradicate, in real-life, there are so many variables at play that the costs of investing full trust in another individual are incredibly expensive. Additionally, I found the examples in historical context to be very useful.

In particular, I found the Volunteer’s DIlemma to be particularly interesting. While I appreciate learning about the extremer examples posed by the author in the readings, I found there are less extreme examples that arise on campus on a daily basis. In many classes, especially where participation is not a part of the grade, it is difficult to spark thought-provoking comments from students. A clear example of this is in my Business Ethics class. The class meets once a week on Wednesday nights from 4:30-5:45, where many students are tired from their long day or the whole week. Our participation grade is based solely on our homework responses, so there are seemingly few incentives to be an active participant. On top of there not being credit for participating.  the professor asks a lot of difficult ethical follow-up questions to the initial question, so the minimal motivation there is to participate regularly is dwindled as many students do not like being put on the spot in front of the rest of the group. As there are little seen benefits to participating for most of the students, everyone in the class hopes someone else will participate whenever the professor asks a question. When one student participates, the student suffers from being put on the spot to answer the difficult questions, but the others gain security from having to answer the other follow up questions. However, if no one were to participate, the professor would ask questions to students at random, in which everyone is in constant fear of being called on. All in all, I find Game Theory to be a fascinating topic and I am excited to learn more in the coming classes and readings.