

Students get class-wide As by boycotting test, "solving Prisoner's Dilemma" - sebkomianos
http://boingboing.net/2013/02/19/students-get-class-wide-as-by.html

======
krcz
Actually I don't think it passes as an instance of Prisoner's Dilemma". Post
clearly says "The students waited outside the rooms to make sure that others
honored the boycott, and were poised to go in if someone had." It would be, if
they couldn't control each other - for example they could have been made to
give non-blank sheet of paper after exam.

~~~
robbrown451
Also, there wasn't an incentive to defect, since they get maximum value by
cooperating.

~~~
krcz
Absolutely, but not relatively. It's as-good-as-everyone vs better-than-
everyone.

------
taproot
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_dilemma>

The prisoner's dilemma is a canonical example of a game analyzed in game
theory that shows why two individuals might not cooperate, even if it appears
that it is in their best interests to do so. It was originally framed by
Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher working at RAND in 1950. Albert W. Tucker
formalized the game with prison sentence rewards and gave it the name
"prisoner's dilemma" (Poundstone, 1992), presenting it as follows:

Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is
in solitary confinement with no means of speaking to or exchanging messages
with the other. The police admit they don't have enough evidence to convict
the pair on the principal charge. They plan to sentence both to a year in
prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the police offer each prisoner a
Faustian bargain. If he testifies against his partner, he will go free while
the partner will get three years in prison on the main charge. Oh, yes, there
is a catch ... If both prisoners testify against each other, both will be
sentenced to two years in jail.

In this classic version of the game, collaboration is dominated by betrayal;
if the other prisoner chooses to stay silent, then betraying them gives a
better reward (no sentence instead of one year), and if the other prisoner
chooses to betray then betraying them also gives a better reward (two years
instead of three). Because betrayal always rewards more than cooperation, all
purely rational self-interested prisoners would betray the other, and so the
only possible outcome for two purely rational prisoners is for them both to
betray each other. The interesting part of this result is that pursuing
individual reward logically leads the prisoners to both betray, but they would
get a better reward if they both cooperated. In reality, humans display a
systematic bias towards cooperative behavior in this and similar games, much
more so than predicted by simple models of "rational" self-interested
action.[1][2][3][4]

------
CodeMage
Previous HN discussion on this: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229076>

