Prisoner’s Dilemma: To Cheat, or not to Cheat Part 6 of 6

In my previous posts, it would seemed that in the game’s simplest form, cheating makes sense. Now here’s where the game changes.

You see, the underlying assumption for the previous scenario is that the game is only played once. You know: thief meets fellow thief, thief loses fellow thief through betrayal, thief does his time, end of story. But what if the game is played repeatedly? Then it would be like a “I know what you did last arrest” and “If you screw me once, I’ll forever be screwing you over.”

If you add all the agony of betrayal over and over, it’s just not worth the little less jail time that very first time. So the thieves will choose to work together in fear of punishment from the other forevermore.

There’s a few conditions for this to work. For example, the total number of games played must to be random or unknown to the players. That fits marriages perfectly: In a til-death-do-us-part kind of deal, you never know if you’ll have five years or fifty years with your partner. So it’s best not to piss them off.

If both parties are there for the long haul, then they have the incentive to be faithful. Building a life together involves contributing to mortgage payments, raising kids, having common social friends, etc.  There is simply too much to lose by cheating. Monogamy is a stable and desired condition because it’s mutually beneficial.

Not very romantic, but there it is.

Of course, I’m not discounting personal integrity, ethics and values. I am just proposing a fun way to view faithfulness through economic theories, and offer a bit of hope that yes, non-cheating rules! Yay!

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I also have a little announcement to make: The good news is, my dark paranormal novel became finalist in a writing award, and my docu-drama TV series just got optioned. The slightly bad news is, due to these time commitments I have to reduce my blog posting from three times a week to two times a week. But The Economics of Love remains near and dear to my heart and I thank you for your ongoing support!