A friend from Argentina once told me Argentina keeps its best wines for themselves and exports the mediocre stuff, even at the sake of profits.
Similarly, a friend from Turkey once said he couldn’t find good Turkish olives outside of Turkey because “Turks are terrible businessmen and keep the best olives to themselves.”
These are anecdotal and might be untrue but I liked the idea.
At an individual level, it’s irrational to cooperate in a prisoner’s dilemma yet experiments show people cooperate.
Contributing to open source projects may fall into this category.
Have you observed any obvious behavior that goes counter to profit maximization? Any cool examples?
It’s only irrational to cooperate in a prisoner’s dilemma game if the rewards are set appropriately for that.
If you raise the individual rewards of the cooperation above those of the individual rewards people would get for defecting, people will in fact cooperate.
But then it stops being a prisoner’s dilemma. What makes the game so intriguing is that individual rewards take you to a suboptimal outcome. When the collective and individual incentives agree, it’s called a prisoner’s delight.
I had to look that (prisoner’s delight) up, very interesting thanks. TIL!
[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1420-9101.2011.02307.x#b6](Binmore, 2004)
Awesome!
Also, prisoners dilemmas can become stag hunts (where cooperation is actually sustained by individual rewards) under scenarios of repeated interaction.