Conditions for Cooperation in Problematic Social Situations

Abstract

The Prisoner’s Dilemma has intrigued Anatol Rapoport as a model of real life conflict situations — the arms race and price reductions by competing firms being his favorite examples — in which individual rationality and collective rationality are at cross purposes (e.g. Rapoport, 1974: 17–18,24). In the social sciences and particularly in social psychology, the game has attracted above all an impressive array of experimental investigations (cf. the now classic study by Rapoport and Chammah, 1965 and the survey in Rapoport, 1974: 19–29). In contrast to such a micro-approach we will try to sketch some implications of Prisoner’s Dilemmas and related situations of strategic interdependence for a more macrosociological problem. Our analysis refers to conditions of cooperation of (individually rational) actors in situations where cooperation generates efficiency, i.e. collective rationality, but is beset by incentive problems. Section II of this paper contains an explication in terms of game theory of such “problematic social situations”, the classical Prisoner’s Dilemma being a paradigmatic example. In Section III some results of the game theoretical analysis of these situations are outlined. In Section IV, we deal with implications of these results for conditions which are conducive to cooperation.