The prisoner’s dilemma works as follows. Imagine that you and a co-conspirator have been arrested after robbing a bank, and are being held in separate jail cells. Now you must decide whether to “cooperate” with each other—by remaining silent and admitting nothing—or to “defect” from your partnership by ratting out the other to the police. You know that if you both cooperate with each other and keep silent, the state doesn’t have enough evidence to convict either one of you, so you’ll both walk free, splitting the loot—half a million dollars each, let’s say. If one of you defects and informs on
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