Talk:Nash equilibrium
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by JLindon (talk | contribs) at 00:54, May 6, 2007. It may differ significantly from current revision.
Your changes are excellent but it's not clear to me why you say the Nash equilibrium is sub-optimal for the prisoner's dilemma. Could you elaborate on that a bit more? Thanks.--Aschlafly 19:38, 5 May 2007 (EDT)
- Well, the prisoner's dilemma is one of those cases where the Nash equilibrium is not the Pareto optimal solution.
- The optimal case would be for both participants to stay silent (in the specific example in the article, both would get six months). However, this is not a Nash equilibrium: If A knows that B chose to stay silent, A would switch to "confess" and improve his own outcome (causing a 10 year punishment for B).
- The only Nash equilibrium is the "confess/confess" scenario (in which both prisoners get a 2 year punishment), which is sub-optimal, compared to the possible outcome if both participants cooperated.
- I could insert this into the article here, but it would be slightly redundant since this is explained in the PD article (with a fancy table and all that). --JLindon 20:54, 5 May 2007 (EDT)