Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Co-action solves social dilemmas

V Sasidevan

IMSc, Chennai

Social dilemmas are situations in which "individually reasonable behavior leads to a situation in which everyone is worse off than they might have been otherwise." A large number of strategic interactions in our surroundings belong to this category. The origin of such dilemmas - which has ramifications for diverse phenomena observed in biological, sociological and economic arenas - can be traced to some of the fundamental assumptions of game theory. In this talk after a discussion of some examples of social dilemmas such as Prisoners Dilemma and Game of Chicken, I will discuss the recently proposed co-action solution to them in which we argue that these dilemmas are a result of mutually inconsistent assumptions in the standard Nash equilibrium framework. The corrective framework of co-action solution shows that contrary to the popular wisdom, there is no conflict between individual rational behavior and collective benefit in social dilemmas.