Pick a depth. Each prompt opens in your AI pre-loaded with the lesson. Click a row to preview the prompt.
The Prisoner's Dilemma is the one 2×2 game every educated person should be able to draw from memory. It demonstrates, starkly, how rational self-interest by each player can produce an outcome that is worse for everyone than the one they could have reached by coordinating. Almost every topic in this course — equilibrium, cooperation, repeated games, mechanism design — is in some sense an answer to 'so what do we do about the Prisoner's Dilemma?'
Both players choose Cooperate or Defect simultaneously. Payoffs are (row, column):