Here’s my summary of this post. Is this getting at the point you’re trying to make?
The essential difference between a one-off Prisoner’s Dilemma and a Stag Hunt is that in the one-shot PD, the prisoners cannot punish or reward each other for cooperating. In a Stag Hunt, the hunters can punish defection and reward cooperation. In both cases, the best outcome is equally good for all players.
The essential difference between a Stag Hunt and a Battle of the Sexes is that in the Stag Hunt, the best outcome is equally successful for all. In Battle of the Sexes, the best one-off outcomes are always unfair to at least one of the participants.
In most real-world situations, we can enforce cooperation. Generally, the outcomes won’t be perfectly fair. They’ll resemble a Battle of the Sexes more than a Stag Hunt or one-off Prisoner’s Dilemma. So the problem is negotiating which unfair outcome the participants will choose. But because the Prisoner’s Dilemma is so well-known, people often resort to it as their first game-theoretic analysis of any given situation.
This summary was helpful for me, thanks! I was sad cos I could tell there was something I wanted to know from the post but couldn’t quite get it
In a Stag Hunt, the hunters can punish defection and reward cooperation
This seems wrong. I think the argument goes “the essential difference between a one-off Prisoner’s Dilemma and an IPD is that players can punish and reward each other in-band (by future behavior). In the real world, they can also reward and punish out-of-band (in other games). Both these forces help create another equilibrium where people cooperate and punishment makes defecting a bad idea (though an equilibrium of constant defection still exists). This payoff matrix is like that of a Stag Hunt rather than a one-off Prisoner’s Dilemma”
Here’s my summary of this post. Is this getting at the point you’re trying to make?
This summary was helpful for me, thanks! I was sad cos I could tell there was something I wanted to know from the post but couldn’t quite get it
This seems wrong. I think the argument goes “the essential difference between a one-off Prisoner’s Dilemma and an IPD is that players can punish and reward each other in-band (by future behavior). In the real world, they can also reward and punish out-of-band (in other games). Both these forces help create another equilibrium where people cooperate and punishment makes defecting a bad idea (though an equilibrium of constant defection still exists). This payoff matrix is like that of a Stag Hunt rather than a one-off Prisoner’s Dilemma”