Accessible text version. Each heading below is one slide, in order. Instructor: Ryan Lamare.
LER 565, Week 3 live session: Prisoner's Dilemmas and How to Overcome Them at Work. Instructor: Ryan Lamare.
One: a quick look at this week's materials. Two: the prisoner's dilemma, recapped. Three: one big game, Titan Wars, over six sprints. Four: Azee match number two; reflection number two is due in Week 4.
Lecture: Cooperation, Defection and the Prisoner's Dilemma. Clips: How to Outsmart the Prisoner's Dilemma; Coffee Wars; Talent Wars in Silicon Valley. Readings: Prisoner's Dilemmas and How to Resolve Them; Workplace Spying. Podcasts: Tit for Tat; The Golden Rule.
Non-zero-sum: the pie can grow or shrink, so cooperation can pay. The prisoner's dilemma: defecting dominates, so both defect. Confess-Confess is individually rational but collectively worse. Escapes: repetition and tit-for-tat, regulation, and binding agreements.
Your second Azee match, same five-minute clocks as last week. Reflection number two, on prisoner's dilemma or coordination games, is due Sunday, July 26. Watch for cooperate-or-defect tradeoffs on the board. Where does grabbing now leave you both worse off later?
You're an engineering manager at Zephyr Technologies. The CEO's secret Project Titan pits Team Alpha against Team Beta. You're graded relative to each other, sprint by sprint. Goal: maximize your team's cumulative budget over six rounds.
Each sprint, your team secretly picks a work standard. Normal Hours: a sustainable forty-hour week, steady output. Crunch, or Grind Mode: eighty-hour weeks to inflate delivery. The CEO only sees how you compare to the other team.
Each cell is the pair of budget changes, Alpha then Beta. Both Normal: plus three million each, sustainable, and the CEO is happy with both. You Crunch and they don't: plus six million to you, minus two million to them, you look like geniuses; the reverse looks slow. Both Crunch: zero and zero, no edge and just burnout.
Six rounds; your team deliberates in a breakout room, three minutes each. When I enter, tell me your choice: Normal or Crunch. Blind submissions: you learn their choice only after. No talking to the other team; track results in your ledger.
Rounds three and five go before the Board, so all payoffs are doubled. Before each, the two teams may meet for two minutes. Only if both sides agree; one representative each, in a private room. Nothing said is binding; it's talk, not a contract.
Crunch tempts every round, but mutual Crunch is zero and zero. Mutual Normal, plus three million each, is better, yet hard to hold. The doubled rounds and meetings raise the stakes on trust. Can you build cooperation, tit-for-tat, and make it stick?
When trust broke, teams sank into mutual Grind, worse for both than Normal. Going public quadrupled the prize for pulling ahead alone, raising the temptation. The clever play: trade the spotlight, one wins Spring and the other Fall, plus twenty-four million each. But the Fall round rewards betrayal, so the trade holds only on trust.
Coordination games: when several outcomes all work. The trick isn't conflict, it's agreeing on which one. Focal points, and how teams converge without talking. Due Sunday, July 26: the Week 4 quiz and Azee reflection number two.