Strategic Engagement - Session 11

I found the prisoner's dilemma exercise we did in class today very interesting. It was interesting because while I've certainly read about scenarios like this many times, I don't think I'd ever actually attempted to act one out.

It was frustrating to have a complete understanding of how the game works and know what you all could come out ahead if only you cooperated, but that there is simply no way to know what the other teams will do. The other thing I found interesting was playing the game with multiple teams and seeing how much that affected the odds. Typically, when you read about the prisoner's dilemma it is with just two people, and even then it is hard to reach a desirable outcome. With multiple teams, it becomes really difficult. I thought that this was a good proxy for the real world, since the more players you have the more difficult it is to achieve collaboration, especially because it is hard to predict how many people will act.

My group was the first group to break everyone's trust, by getting everyone to agree to choose Y and then choosing X instead. We did this because we interpreted the game's rules to mean earn as much money as you can, meaning our team. What is particularly interesting is that we then went back to choosing Y in the final round; and I'm not quite sure why we did it. Going into the final round I thought we should choose X for sure, since we would be better off that way with every scenario except every other team also choosing X which seemed very unlikely. So why did we choose Y? And more importantly why was I one of the people to advocate for choosing Y?

I think in the end we choose Y because we felt bad for deceiving everyone the first time around, and felt like the rest of the class was quite mad at us. The fact that emotions can prevent you from acting completely rationally in a little classroom game I think really says a lot about situations of strategic engagement and negotiation in the real world. If our emotions affected us and caused us to act unpredictably in this setting, it is clear that emotions can easily affect people and organizations in the real world. While you can always hope that people will act rationally, and make decisions based on their best interests, you should be careful never to assume you know how they will act!