Len Fisher, Ph.D., Rock, Paper, Scissors : game theory in everyday life, 2008
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pp.1-2
Game theory tells us what is going on behind the confrontations, broken promises, and just plain cheating that we so often see in domestic quarrels, neighborhood arguments, industrial disputes, and celebrity divorce cases. It also gives guidance to the best strategies to use in situations of competition and conflict, which is why big business and the military have taken to it like ducks to water since it was invented in the late 1940s.
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It provides businessmen with strategies to get the better of their competitors, and guides Western military thinking to an alarming extent.
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To give just one example, all five game theorists who have won Nobel Prizes in economics have been employed as advisors to the Pentagon at some stage in their careers.
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But there is another side to game theory ── a side that concerns cooperation rather than confrontation, collaboration rather than competition. Biologists have used it to help understand how cooperation evolves in nature in the face of “survival of the fittest”.
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Sociologists, psychologists, and political scientists are using it to understand why we have such problems in cooperating, despite the fact that we need cooperation as never before if we are to resolve important and worrying problems like global warming, resource depletion, pollution, terrorism, and war.
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I wanted to see whether it could be used in everyday situations and to find out whether the lessons learned might be helpful in resolving larger-scale problems. At the least, I thought, I might discover some clues as to how we as individuals could help to resolve such problems.
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Game theorists have discovered an amazing link between all of these problem ── a hidden barrier to cooperation that threaten to produce untold damage unless we learn to do something about it, fast.
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The barrier presents us with a catch-22 logical trap that is a constant, if often unrecognized, presence in family arguments, neighborhood disputes, and day-to-day social interactions, as well as in the global issues that we now face.
pp.2-3
It even accounts for the way that spoons mysteriously disappear from the communal areas of offices.
p.3
The serious explanation, though, was that this was an example of the Tragedy of the Commons ── a scenario that was brought to public attention by the California ecologist and game theorist Garret Hardin in a 1968 essay, although philosophers have been worrying about it since the time of Aristotle.
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Hardin illustrated it with the parable of a group of herders each grazing his own animals on common land, with one herder thinking about adding an extra animal to his herd. An extra animal will yield a tidy profit, and the overall grazing capacity of the land will only be slightly diminished, so it seems perfectly logical for the herder to add an extra animal. The tragedy comes when all the other herders think the same way. They all add extra animals, the land becomes overgrazed, and soon there is no pasture left.
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Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation, 1984
pp.7-8
It can be a very tight question as to which will emerge, with just a small change in circumstances making a vast difference to the outcome, as happens in boom-and-bust economic cycle and in the expansion and contraction of animal populations. Mathematicians call the critical point a bifurcation point, with the prospect of two very different futures depending on which path is followed.
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The problem of cooperation is often the problem of finding a strategy that will tilt the balance of tit for tat toward a cooperative, back-scratching future rather than one of escalating conflict.
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My aim was to assemble a toolkit of potential strategies for cooperation, in the same way that I have built up a toolkit of techniques for tackling scientific problems during my life as a scientist.
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My conclusion in these two chapters is that we can't rely on external authorities or on our own sense of fairness to produce lasting cooperation, and that we must look more deeply at how we can use our own self-interest to make the cooperating self-enforcing.
p.17
I soon discovered that the whole field of ethics, which is concerned with the principles that we should live by to create a stable and just society, comes down to the story of historical attempts to get around the problems exemplified by the Prisoner's and other social dilemma, which have their basis in logic and mathematics.
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The great breakthrough in understanding social dilemmas came in 1949, when John Nash discovered that all of them arise from the same basic logical trap.
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He proved his genius within eighteen months by using the recently developed science of game theory first to identify the logical trap (now known as the “Nash equilibrium”) and then to prove a startling proposition ── that there is at least one Nash equilibrium lying in wait to trap us in every situation of competition or conflict in which the parties are unwilling or unable to communicate.
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pp.44-47
p.45
mishna (a brief set of conclusions)
Two of the recommendations made intuitive sense, but the third puzzled Talmudic scholars until very recently.
If the estate was worth 300 dinars, they recommended proportional division (50, 100, 150), which satisfies the ratios specified in the marriage contracts. If the state was worth only 100 dinars, the sages decided that equal division would be a fairer split.
pp.45-46
What scholars could not understand until 1985 was why the rabbis had recommended a 50, 75, 75 split if the man left an estate worth the intermediate amount of 200 dinars.
p.46
The recommendation did not seem to make any sort of sense, and many scholars dismissed it outright. One even claimed that since he could not understand it, it must be a mistranslation.
p.46
Then the problem came to the attention of the Nobel Prize-winning game theorist Robert Aumann, who in collaboration with economist Michael Maschler used game theory to prove that the rabbis involved in the original discussion had brilliantly hit upon the optimum, fairest solution to the problem.
p.46
The argument that they presented is both beautiful and simple. They began by considering the problem of how to divide a resource when one person claims ownership of all of it and another claims ownership of half of it. The answer? Divide it according to the ratio of 75:25, because the ownership of half the resource by one of the parties is undisputed (and goes to that party), leaving the other half in dispute, for which the fairest solution is to divide the second half 50:50. They called their solution “equal division of the contested sum”, and proved that in the case of the man with three wives “the division of the estate among the three creditors is such that any two of them divide the sum they together receive, according to the principle of equal division of the contested sum.”
p.46
It sounded to me as though this would be an excellent principle to apply to sharing in everyday life, first because it is so simple and second because it feels so fair. I had the opportunity to try it out when a friend and I went to a garage sale and found a stall loaded high with secondhand books. Rather than competing for the most desirable books, we pooled our resources and bought all the books that either of us wanted.
pp.46-47
Then we divided them into three piles: the ones that I particularly liked but he didn't want, the ones that he particularly liked but I didn't want, and the ones that we both wanted. We then took turns in choosing a book at at time from the third pile (the contested sum) until we had divided it equally. Very simple. Very satisfying.
p.51
Democratic sharing isn't always so easy to achieve, as I found when I was the policy coordinator for a newly formed, and now extinct, political party in Australia. One of the reasons for our extinction was our keenness to be truly democratic. Every policy decision had to be discussed, decided, and agree upon democratically by the whole of the membership. This took an unconscionable amount of time and a huge amount of adminstration, and often resulted in watered-down or even self-contradictory policies.
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I decided to try an experiment in making things easier for the members (and for myself) by introducing a decision-making method called the Delphi technique. The idea has game theory roots, and it is very simple in principle. Everyone has their say (about policies in this particular case) in a questionaire, and then an independent facilitator (me again, in this case ── we were a very small party!) summarizes their arguments and conclusions and sends the summary back out to all members of the group. Everyone can then vote again after they have considered and revised their arguments and conclusions in the light of what the other have said.
The idea is for the members of the group to use the best information available to them to converge on the best decision.
p.52
My investigation of I Cut and You Choose revealed that it can be a very effective strategy for fair sharing but that it usually requires enforcement by an external authority to make it work (as in my father's division of the fireworks). Fairness itself does not provide guaranteed self-enforcement of cooperative agreements when it comes to the practical politics of everyday living.
p.86
French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau saw the story as a metaphor for the eternal tension between social cooperation and individual freedom. In his words (referring to the social contract between the individual and the state), “True freedom consists in giving up some of our freedoms so that we may have freedom.”
pp.79-80 Schelling point
Nobel Prize economist Thomas Schelling
Thomas Schelling, described it as a “focal point for each person's expectation of what the other expects him to expect to be expected to do.”
p.79
The clue to a Schelling point may come as some sort of social convention, as when a man and woman are heading for the same door, as when a man and woman are heading for the same door and the man politely stands back to let the woman go first, when bus passengers line up to enter a bus, or when people leaving a plane wait for those in the aisle to move ahead before leaving their seats.
pp.79-80
We also see this in conversations, in which the person talking may be thought of as being on the winning side of a Nash equilibrium; it may come in the form of a pause to let the other person take their turn on the winning side of the alternative Nash equilibrium.
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Schelling points provide cooperative solutions to problems involving parties that would like to coordinate their actions but can't communicate to do so.
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Schelling's own example concerned two people who have to meet on a certain day in New York City but neither of them knows when or where. When he put the question to a group of students, the majority answer was “noon at the information booth at Grand Central Station.” Its tradition as a meeting place made this a natural Schelling point.
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In a real-life example, two colleagues of mine managed to meet in Paris, even though neither of them could remember when or where to meet on the specified day. After trying the Eiffel Tower, one of them remembered that the other really liked churches, and they eventually met in the Notre Dame cathedral at 6:00 P.M.
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Schelling points rely on implicit or explicit clues, and problems can arise when people give false clues.
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According to psychologist Geoffrey Beattie, this may have arisen from her earlier speech training, which produced a “drawl on the stressed syllable ... and a falling intonation pattern associated with the end of a clause.” Both of these have been identified by other psychologists as a turn-offering clues ── that is, Schelling points.
p.102
I found that standing back to let the strong ones fight it out before entering the fray worked in many areas of life. This applied especially to committee meetings. Rather than enter a debate at an early stage, I could frequently get my way simply by waiting until others had argued their points vociferously to the point of exhaustion, and then bringing up my own point at the last minute
p.102
Kilgour and Brams argue that we can still learn lessons, so long as we recognize that we need carefully to identify the rules under which the real-life versions are being played out. This is particularly important because optimal play can be very sensitive to a slight change in the circumstances.
pp.102-103
One of the most robust lessons is that the strongest participant is often in the weakest position, since it will be an early target.
p.109 ritualized displays
As we know, many animals use ritualized displays to negotiate for mates, food, and territory. Humans also use body language and ostentatious display
p.109 Ultimate Irrelevant Encyclopaedia
p.111 threats and promises
Threats and promises are the twin tools of negotiation. The choice of which to use, however, depends very much on circumstances. To be effective, they must be believed.
p.111
Threats are cheaper than promises, because if a threat is effective, it will not need to be followed through.
p.112 India!
But we didn't know India! Instead of giving us the change, the merchant wanted to sell us more clothes in lieu, and he was prepared to bargain all day rather than give us the actual change.
p.112
We feel no compunction about using this approach, because our Indian friends assure us that in almost every case the merchants know exactly how much their botton line is, and they usually succeed in getting a high price from us anyway.
p.112 Game theorists, coalition
Game theorists have extended the term [coalition] to mean any alliance in which the members coordinate their strategies to work cooperatively toward a common objective.
pp.112-113
In the eyes of a game theorist, marriage is a coalition (though not always a very successful one).
p.113 game theorist Roger McGain
p.115
side payment (payment that you make to keep them on your side and to stop them from leaving your coalition)
p.115 cliques
p.115 backstabbing, gossiping, switching of allegiances
p.118
But this was like a red flag to a bull, and she kept coming up with more jobs that just had to be done.
p.118
As I mentioned in chapter 3, a Nash equilibrium that we reach by means of such hints is called a Schelling point.
p.129
According to Barbara Misztal, author of Trust in Modern Societies, trust performs three functions: it makes social life more predictable, it creates a sense of community, and it makes it easier for people to work together.
p.168 fear of sanctions
Social norms are important guidelines for cooperation. They are, in the words of economists Ernst Fehr and Urs Fischbacher, “standards of behaviour that are based on widely shared beliefs [about] how individual group members ought to behave in a given situation.” But what makes us stick to these standards is another question entirely. The bulk of the evidence suggests that our primary motivation is the fear of sanctions by other members of the group.
pp.172-175
p.174 be firm, but be prepared to forgive
A less irrevocable trigger strategy is Generous Tit for Tat, which will respond to cooperation with cooperation but will also sometimes (not always) respond to defection with a further offer of cooperation.
p.174
A marriage partner might decide to come back after a while, for example, and give their partner a second chance. (If they will come back only when their partner shows definite evidence of change, they are using ordinary Tit for Tat.)
p.174
Any of these strategies might succeed. Any of them might fail. Generous Tit for Tat is less punishing than harshly retributive Mrs. B, because it occasionally introduces the forgiving strategy of Mrs. D to break cycles of retribution and counterretribution.
p.174
It looks like the best practical approach to many of life's problems.
p.174
According to relationship psychologists with whom I have discussed the matter, it is the one that is most closely aligned to the psychologically based strategy “be firm, but be prepared to forgive.”
pp.174-175
Computer simulations have shown, however, that it is outperformed by PAVLOV, which continues to cooperate so long as the other party does but which will also automatically offer cooperation if both parties have lost out through mutual defection in their last encounter.
p.175
As soon as we saw each other cheat on the cooperation by taking that first drink, we each played Pavlov by offering not to drink if the other one didn't, and the situation was saved.
Win-Stay, Lose-Shift, by offering cooperation when both parties have lost out through cheating on a previous encounter, seems to be the most effective of all the trigger strategies that have so far been investigated.
p.175
All of them rely on the power of repeated interactions to induce and maintain cooperation.
p.175
There is another factor, though, that the memory of previous encounters doesn't even enter into.
p.178
Martin Nowak has recently brought all of these elements together in a wonderful synthesis, “Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation”, based on the notion that a cooperator is someone who pays a cost (c) for another individual to receive a benefit (b).
pp.178-179
The individual cooperator loses out, but know that a population of cooperators has a higher average evolutionary fitness (that is, its chance of surviving and reproducing) than does a population of defectors.
p.179
Nowak identifies five different mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation, each of which has a different cost-benefit relationship:
1. Kin Selection:
2. Repeated Interactions (Direct Reciprocity):
3. Indirect Reciprocity:
4. Network Reciprocity:
5. Group Selection:
pp.195-198
Here is my personal selection of the most useful──my top ten tips for cooperation in everyday life:
1. Say if you win, shift if you lose.
2. Bring an extra player in.
3. Set up some form of reciprocity.
4. Restrict your own future options so that you will lose out if you defect on cooperation.
5. Offer trust.
This is another way of offering credible commitment. If you genuinely offer trust, trust will often be returned, making cooperation that much easier.
6. Create a situation that neither party can independently escape from without loss.
This is, of course, a Nash equilibrium. If the cooperative solution to a dilemma is also a Nash equilibrium, your problems are solved.
7. Use side payments to create and maintain cooperative coalitions.
The side payment can be money, social or emotional rewards, or even outright bribery. All that matters is to ensure that people will lose out if they leave your coalition to join or form another one.
8. Be aware of the seven deadly dilemmas, and try to reorganize the benefits and costs to different players so that the dilemma disappears.
This is, of course, not as easy as it sounds, or the world would be a happier place. It is a step in the right direction, though, and always worth a try.
9. Divide goods, responsibilities, jobs, and penalties so that the result is envy free.
Our sense of fairness is a strong motivator; use it by setting up situations in which the process is agreed upon and transparent, and the outcome is obviously fair.
10. Divide large groups into smaller ones.
p.206
23 To often, parties will agree to a negotiated compromise and then one party will break the agreement when it suits them
This is exactly what Adolf Hitler did when he signed the Munich Agreement with Neville Chamberlain, Benito Mussolini, and Édouard Daladier in September 1938. The agreement handed de facto control of Czechoslovakia to Germany. (It should not be confused with the abortive England-Germany peace treaty that was later signed by Hitler and Chamberlain alone.) The three non-German signatories attempted to minimize the possibility of war by permitting Germany's annexation of Czechoslovakia, so long as Hitler agreed to go no further. Hitler beat their strategy by agreeing to the deal and then breaking the bargain and invading Poland a year later, when had had time to build up Germany's military strength.
p.50
Czechoslovakia was only created as an independent country in 1918. The country is made up of two separate peoples, the Czechs and the Slovaks, each speaking a different language. Many Czechoslovaks are farmers, but the country also had important coal, iron, and steel industries.
(The picture atlast of the world / illustrated by Brian Delf., 1. atlases. [1. atlases. 2. geography.], 1991, G1021.P65 1991, 912--dc20, 1991, p.50 )
pp.203-231
132 You can't get trust in a bottle You can, however, put it in your pocket. Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization scientist John Zic and his team have developed a “trust extension device” that can be plugged into strange computers. Carried on a memory stick or a mobile phone, it makes trust portable, opening the way for secure transactions to be undertaken anywhere, even in an Internet café. The device creates its own environment on an untrusted computer and, before it runs an application, it establishes trust with the remote enterprise server. Both ends must prove their identities to each other and also prove that the computing environments are as expected. Once the parties prove to each other that they are trustworthy, the device accesses the remote server and the transaction takes place.
pp.210-211
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When I was visiting Laos a few year ago, I fell into conversation with a local guide and made the point that Laotians seemed to be hell-bent on pursuing a better material way of life and losing their traditional way of life in the process. He laughted in my face. “You should try living it”, he said, “and then see whether you come up with the same argument.”
He was quite right. I was valuing his cultural heritage from my perspective and not from his.
p.211
The Center for International Forestry Research is now trying out a new method when it comes to resources in Borneo, where they are finding the sort of decision-guiding information that simply doesn't emerge from classical biodiversity surveys (Charlie Pye-Smith, “Biodiversity: A New Perspective”, New Scientist, December 10, 2005, 50-53). Researchers ask the indigenous people which resources are most important to them and respect their views when it comes to “cake cutting” and different uses.
p.211
40 What really worked was a bribe
p.213
51 Delphi technique
Developed by the RAND corporation in the 1960s (where game theory was also being developed and exploited), the Delphi technique has been used by many large organizations──not only businesses and government but also organizations like the National Cancer Instistute. It is named after the Greek oracle at Delphi. Her name was Pythia, and she was a priestess of the god Apollo. She is supposed to be have delivered prophecies inspired by Apollo, but, more likely, they were actually inspired by ethylene gas leaking into the cave where she lived.
For a good description of the modern Delphi technique, see Allan Cline, “Prioritization Process Using Delphi Technique”, white paper, Carolla Development, 2000, www.carolla.com/wp-delph.htm.
p.214
51 averaged opinion of a mass of equally expert or equally ignorant observers
Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musing on Liux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: O'Reilly, 2001).
([ google or bing ‘cathedral and the bazaar’, you should be able to find a link to a copy of this TEXT ])
p.215
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Bertrand Russell, “In Praise of Idleness”, but he made a valuable point when he said that “the idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich” (In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays [New York: Routledge, 2004], www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html).
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p.236
140 Burn your bridges The ultimate in burning your bridges comes from some primitive fungi and algae that gave up their individuality to form a combined organism called a “lichen” (with the algae harvesting light for energy and the fungi extracting chemical nutrients from the environment). The original fungi and algae have long since become extinct, but lichens continue to thrive. Some bacteria showed a similar commitment early in cellular evolution when they chose to use living cells as homes in return for providing the cell with energy. Those bacteria eventually lost their ability to exist independently, becoming the mitochondria that we harbor today.
This is not to suggest that any of these species made a conscious decision to limit their own options by burning their bridges. Evolutionary pressures took care of that.
p.240
148 James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, first published in 1890, a wide-ranging comparative study of mythology and religion that very much shocked its audience when it was first published,
The title comes from the Greek myth that is retold in Virgil's Aeneid, in which Aeneas journeys to Hades with the Sybil and presents the golden bough to the gatekeeper in order to gain admission.
p.241
149 “the trust mechanism” Daniel M. Hausman, Trust in Game Theory, unpublished paper, 1997, philosophy.wisc.edu/hausman/papers/trust.htm, used with permission.
p.241
152 person-centered approach This approach, in which the client is offered “unconditional positive regard”, is now used by many professional counselors. It was pioneered by Rogers and described in his groundbreaking book Client-Centered Therapy: Its Current Pratice, Implications, and Theory (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951). For more information, see www.carlrogers.info/
pp.241-242
155 Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby and Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid
When the five-year-old Julian Huxley (later become famous as zoologist and founder of UNESCO) read The Water Babies, he asked his grandfather (the redoubtable T. H. Huxley, known as “Darwin's bulldog”) whether he had ever seen a water baby. His grandfather's reply was a masterpiece of adult writing to a child without patronizing:
My dear Julian,
I never could make sure about that water baby. I have seen Babies
in water and Babies in bottles; but the Baby in the water was not
in the the bottle and the Baby in the bottle was in the water. My
friend who wrote the story of the Water Baby was a very kind
man and very clever. Perhaps he thought I could see as much in
the water as he did. There are some people who see a great deal
and some who see very little in the same things.
When you grow up I dare say you will be one of the great-
deal seers and see things more wonderful than Water Babies
where other folks see nothing. (Julian Huxley, Memories
[London: Allen & Unwin, 1970], 24-25.)
p.242
155 repeated interaction are an important key to finding cooperative solutions This is on the assumption that the sequence of interactions is indefinite ── in other words, its end cannot be predicted. If it does have a definite, predictable end, then the Prisoner's Dilemma and other social dilemma still continue to exert their stranglehold, at least in theory, because we can always look forward and reason backward to come up with the conclusion that it is rational to defect on cooperation at the last step (the end game), and thence on the step before that, and the step before that, and the ... By reasoning from the end backward, when we know that there is a definite end, the whole game unravels.
p.242
156 ethic of reciprocity While I was writing this chapter, I came across a wonderful example from the show Dr. Phil. Talking about mass killers, Dr. Phil made the point that the one thing they had in common was that they all felt excluded. “What would have been the effect”, he mused, “if someone had said at some stage, ‘hey, come and sit with us.’”
p.245
161 the stolen generation A particularly poignant example of what happened is depicted in the film Rabbit-Proof Fence, which is based on the real story of three young girls of Aboriginal descent who escaped from the orphanage to which they had been taken, and trekked across Australia to rejoin their families.
p.246
Bertrand Russell's Sceptical Essays,
Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man,
David Attenborough's The Living Planet,
Simon Singh's Fermat's Enigma
p.247
165 the strongest eventually coming out on top
natural selection ── that is, the survival and propagation of those members of a species that are best fitted to their environment and circumstances.
Darwin meant it to describe any situation in which species that are best adapted to their environmental circumstances have the best chance of surviving for sufficiently long to pass their survival characteristics to their progeny.
p.247
* Darwin used it in The Origin of Species, which was published in 1859. In chapter 4, entitled “Natural Selection: Or the Survival of the Fittest”, Darwin wrote that “this preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest.”
pp.248-249
165 Successful cooperative social groups need their members to be altruistic and cooperative The first person to recognize the importance of cooperation in evolution was the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, who argued in his 1902 book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (www.gutenberg.org/etext/4341) that “sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle ... mutual aid is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.” Indeed, many experiments have now shown that most animals look after their kin to protect their genetic inheritance not because they know that this is what they are doing, but because those animals that survive and prosper are the ones that have cooperative behavior encoded in their genes.
Kropotkin wrote Mutual Aid after a journey to eastern Siberia and northern Manchuria. He was clearly looking for a biological justification for socialism, but his observations nevertheless stand as an unbiased account of nature in action. His search was based on a lecture that he had heard at a Russian Congress of Naturalists in January 1880, during which the St. Petersburg zoologist Karl Kessler had spoken on the “law of mutual aid”. “Kessler's idea”, Kropotkin, “was, that besides the law of Mutual Struggle there is in Nature the law of Mutual Aid, which, for the success of the struggle for life, and especially for the progressive evolution of the species, is far more important than the law of mutual contest.”
What he saw during his journey made two lasting impressions. “One of them”, he said, “was the extreme severity of the struggle for existence which most species of animals have to carry on against an inclement Nature; the enormous destruction of life which periodically results from natural agencies; and the consequent paucity of life over the vast territory which fell under my observation.” The other was that, “even in those few spots where animal life teemed in abundance, I failed to find ── although I was eagerly looking for it ── that bitter struggle for the means of existence, among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists (though not always by Darwin himself) as the dominant characteristic of struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution.” Instead, he discovered countless examples of “the importance of the Mutual Aid factor of evolution.”
p.252
178 “Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation” Martin A. Nowak, Science 314 (2006): 1560-63. If you don't read any of the other references that I have given, at least read this! The text can be found at www.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/~lchang/material/Evolutionary/Group behavior rules.pdf.
p.252
181 One surprising way to produce harmony and cooperation from conflict, disagreement, and discord is to introduce an even more discordant person
Business gurus Barry Nalebuff and Adam Brandenburger provide a market example in their book Co-opetition ([London: HarperCollins, 1996], 105-6), saying that it can sometimes be worthwhile for a business to actively encourage competitors ── even to pay them to become competitors. They cite the example of Intel, which licensed its original 8086 microprocessor technology to twelve other companies. This created a competitive market for the chip and assured buyers that they wouldn't end up being held hostage by a single supplier. With that guarantee, buyers were willing to commit to Intel's technology.
The opposite effect is also possible, as illustrated by Jaroslav Hasek's Good Soldier Svek (translated by Cecil Parrott [London: Penguin, 1974]), a novel set during the First World War, in which the lead character practically brings the German army to its knees by his over enthusiastic cooperation and literal following of orders.
p.254
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