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warbo comments on Stupid Questions February 2015 - Less Wrong
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I'm thinking of a dilemma that I thought was called the farmer's dilemma, but that redirects to the prisoner's dilemma on wikipedia, and google doesn't help me out either. Is there a standard name for this dilemma?
Two farmers have adjacent fields. If either of them irrigates (U-1), both get the benefits from it (U+5). If I cooperate, my opponent can get a payoff of 4 by cooperating or 5 by defecting, so he has an incentive to defect; my own payoff is guaranteed 4. If I defect, my opponent can get a payoff of 4 by cooperating (and I get 5), or 0 by defecting (and I also get 0), so he has an incentive to cooperate. We both want at least of us to cooperate, but as long as the other cooperates, we have a mild preference for defecting.
This mostly reminds me of the "tragedy of the commons", where everyone benefits when an action is taken (like irrigating land, picking up litter, etc.), but it costs some small amount to one who takes the action, such that everyone agrees that action should be taken, but nobody wants to do it themselves.
There is also the related concept of "not in my back yard" (NIMBY), where everyone agrees that some 'necessary evil' be done, like creating a new landfill site or nuclear power plant, but nobody wants to take the sacrifice themselves (ie. have it "in their back yard").
Some real-life examples of this effect http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/ten-reallife-examples-of-the-tragedy-of-the-common.html
This doesn't feel like either of those, to me.
Tragedy of the commons and NIMBY seem like they have symmetric Nash equilibria where the total payoff is terrible. In the farmer's dilemma, the Nash equilibria are asymmetric, at D/C and C/D, and these are optimal in terms of total utility, but they're unfair.