An astute student emailed:
I was listening to a podcast where there is an application of the prisoner's dilemma to a game show, Golden Balls, and there is an odd tactic that is adopted by a participant. Thought it might be of interest to you as we just did our chapter on game theory a couple of weeks back. I have put up the web link for the episode, golden balls story is the first one and is about 20 minutes long.
http://www.radiolab.org/story/whats-left-when-youre-right/
I happen to love this podcast and this episode is great. Have a listen and then see if you agree with my analysis (joint with the student) below
(Monetary) Payoffs to the game are simplified and summarised below
Nick | |||
Steal | Split | ||
Ibrahim | Steal | 0,0 | 2, 0 |
Split | 0, 2 | 1,1 |
If we think of monetary, material payoffs only, there are 3 Nash equilibria. I underline best responses above; remember, best responses include 'weak' best responses (where you are indifferent).
Some friends of mine wrote multiple papers analysing data from the Dutch (original) version of this game show. I discussed their paper in a Game Theory module I taught a long while back. A key issue is that utility payoffs may involve fairness concerns and not just monetary rewards.
The paper was"A Public Dilemma: Cooperation with Large Stakes and a Large Audience” by Belot, Bhaskar, and van de Ven. ... now I think they published 3 separate papers based on this data!
HERE were my lecture slides on this