Pushing Back: Lessons from the Prisoner’s Dilemma
Apply the IPD Solution to Employee/Manager Relationships
The Prisoner’s Dilemma from mathematical game theory makes for an interesting launching point for a discussion about cooperation. The Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (IPD) is even more interesting, and you can apply a solution for IPD to the employee/manager relationship. In fact, IPD can help you think about interactions with your manager as a non-zero-sum game — meaning both sides can win.
In the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma, two prisoners, A and B, are captured for their roles in the same crime. The police interrogate each separately, and neither prisoner can communicate with the other. Each has a choice of whether to cooperate with the other by staying silent, or defecting and turning in their partner. What can happen looks something like this:
If you play the game only once, it’s easy to determine what to do. Say you are prisoner A. You look at B’s options and see which move is best for you.
- If B decides to cooperate, then if you cooperate, you serve a year, but if you defect you go free, so defect is better.
