The Prisoner's Dilemma is a famous problem in game theory. It is basically about a problem where the payoffs and penalties for the participants are structured such that the point of equilibrium is when each player cheats. This occurs all the time in business, particularly in pricing strategy.
All the rumblings about newspaper sites charging for content and getting their peers to do the same is effectively a multi-party Prisoner's Dilemma. The incentive to cheat will be high. So the trick for the newspaper execs will be to figure out what incentives/rewards can be put in place to discourage cheating (ie giving content away to get market share and ad dollars), all while not being anti-competitive. Good luck to them.
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