John F. Rizzo is an expert on losing. However, if you want to win, you would do better to seek advice from an expert on winning.
David Sirlin is such an expert, a renowned Street Fighter player and game designer. He wrote a series of articles with the title "Playing to Win", about playing competitive games at a high level, which were so popular that he expanded them into a book. You can either read it for free online (donations are appreciated) or purchase a dead tree edition.
Any further summary would simply be redundant when you could simply read Sirlin's own words, so here is the link:
http://www.sirlin.net/ptw
Take my comments in light of the context.
I can't really get a handle on where you are coming from. Are you saying that it is often useful to bluff the people you are cooperating with, or would it be a once in the blue moon kind of situation? Give an example of it helping?
Only if you have total knowledge of the situation... Consider the human body, the places where competition help it to achieve objectives, (the brain possibly and the immune system) are the portions trying to gain knowledge about the outside world. Can you tell me how competition would help the human body apart from in these situations?
Drivers often slow down or stop far ahead of time for pedestrians, wasting more of their time to do so than it costs the pedestrian to wait for the car. When I'm on foot and anticipate this, I often bluff the driver by looking away or pretending to change direction. It's minor, but effective and quite frequent.
What about perfect knowledge of a prisoner's dilemma involving non-cooperative agents?