power and negotiation and game theory

Tyeliah's taking a class called Power and Negotiation. Every week she has to negotiate. Sometime soon she has to write a three page paper about a negotiation she has recently done outside of class - she wanted to use negotiating for free movie tickets when the movie theater audio was playing at mute level, but i don't think she'll be able to write 3 pages on that - so she'll probably write about negotiating with me for who's doing the dishes

Anyways, one of her negotiations took place as a team negotiating with some other team where each team had the option to cooperate or screw the other team. Interestingly, the goal was for the two teams to maximize their combined points, not for one team to beat the other so it seems like the incentive would be to cooperate ... but apparently the incentive to beat the other team won out and most teams tried to screw each other.

In my various internet wanderings I read about game competitions where people write computer programs that pursue different gaming strategies.

In one-off games, almost everyone ends up screwing the other team, but in repeat games the incentive is to cooperate until the last game and then screw the other team on the last game ... but the other team knows this so they screw your team the game before the last game ... but the other team knows this so ... and so on ...

It turns out the best strategy is tit for tat ... do whatever your opponent did on their last turn.

4 months ago this blog post would have been fully sourced with links to interesting articles about game theory and deep, silly thoughts about what it means that the tit for tat strategy is the maximal strategy and so on and so forth ... now I have a job and all I want to do with my weekends is lounge on the couch and take walks outside on sunny days not look up interesting articles for your edification... such is life...