Game theory and the Golden Rule

There’s a nice game theory cartoon over at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal


The cartoon is very well done, though I must address a common misunderstanding.

The Golden Rule is not opposed but rather entirely compatible with game theory. In fact, the golden rule emerges naturally as a strong strategy in the repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma, called by economists as the “Tit-for-Tat” strategy.

It is no surprise that the golden rule has analogs in many world cultures.



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  • http://www.franchise-info.ca michael webster

    Interestingly, if the dilemma game in this example was played with the labels, rat or don’t rat, as the strategies, I am pretty sure that we would see a high degree of coordination in the simple one shot game.

    But of course game theory is a theory that is supposed to produce predictions which are invariant with respect to among other things the labels of the strategy.

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