Tag Archives: Prisoner’s Dilemma

Faking a Prisoners’ Dilemma to Get Out of Trouble

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Imagine you committed a crime alone and the police eventually figure out that you did it. You believe there is enough evidence against you for you to be convicted of the crime, and you will serve a long sentence. You have nothing to offer the police to reduce your sentence or avoid getting in trouble at all. So what could you do? You could make up an accomplice to reduce your sentence. In other words, you could create a prisoners’ dilemma. In the fake prisoners’ dilemma, as long as you confess, no matter what the fake accomplice does (stay silent Continue reading Faking a Prisoners’ Dilemma to Get Out of Trouble→

The Quantitative Peace has been “Freaked”

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Since it is possible for a low-traffic website to be Slashdotted, and Farked (that is, sent a  large amount of traffic from a highly visited site), I think the term "freaked" or "Freak(onomics)ed out" may be apt here: Graph generated and borrowed from statcounter.com. The unique visitors are still climbing! The spike in traffic resulted from the Freakonomic’s winner list for the Prisoner’s Dilemma contest including a gracious link to a previous discussion of their contest found here.  Our former visitor numbers were not overly flattering, but we were content with our current reader base given that a) we attempt Continue reading The Quantitative Peace has been “Freaked”→

Prisoner’s Dilemma Answers

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I posted previously that Freakonomics was hosting a Prisoner’s Dilemma contest.  About a week ago they selected the top five answers and had a quick voting contest (comment democracy with 48 hours to decide the winner).  Since I am both currently attending one of the EITM summer programs and exercising my current mathematical knowledge by attempting to run a maximum likelihood estimation of a generalized Prisoner’s Dilemma model with a normally distributed cost function to the players for cooperation; it seemed like a good time to return to the post and evaluate the answers provided. Adding a pre-game to the Continue reading Prisoner’s Dilemma Answers→

The Complexity of Fairy Cooperation

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Automated recommendation software can be a very efficient technique to increase revenues and doubly so in the world of click-to-purchase materials and low thresholds for impulsive purchases.  However, these algorithms can produce some hilarious results given enough interest.  For example, after the jump, see Amazon’s current match for Axelrod’s The Complexity of Cooperation.

Freakonomics allows one question for Prisoner’s Dilemma – Does it Matter?

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Dubner at the NYTimes Freakonomics Blog asks the following question to his readers given  prisoner’s dilemma problem: Pretend for a minute that you have done something to put yourself in jeopardy and are facing a real-life Prisoner’s Dilemma. Now pretend additionally that you get to choose your partner in the dilemma. There are three people to choose from. You cannot see or talk directly to the three people, but you are allowed to ask one question of each of the three people to help make your decision. What is the one question you’d ask? Apparently, selected winners will receive material Continue reading Freakonomics allows one question for Prisoner’s Dilemma – Does it Matter?→