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The prisoner's dilemma is a game theory thought experiment involving two rational agents, each of whom can either cooperate for mutual benefit or betray their partner ("defect") for individual gain. The dilemma arises from the fact that while defecting is rational for each agent, cooperation yields a higher payoff for each.
According to Maynard Smith, in the preface to Evolution and the Theory of Games, "paradoxically, it has turned out that game theory is more readily applied to biology than to the field of economic behaviour for which it was originally designed". Evolutionary game theory has been used to explain many seemingly incongruous phenomena in nature. [122]
Buridan's ass: How can a rational choice be made between two outcomes of equal value? Chainstore paradox: Even those who know better play the so-called chain store game in an irrational manner. Decision-making paradox: Selecting the best decision-making method is a decision problem in itself.
The mythological Judgement of Paris required selecting from three incomparable alternatives (the goddesses shown).. Decision theory or the theory of rational choice is a branch of probability, economics, and analytic philosophy that uses the tools of expected utility and probability to model how individuals would behave rationally under uncertainty.
In this classification, a deductive-nomological (D-N) explanation of an occurrence is a valid deduction whose conclusion states that the outcome to be explained did in fact occur. The deductive argument is called an explanation, its premisses are called the explanans (L: explaining) and the conclusion is called the explanandum (L: to be explained).
The Allais paradox is a choice problem designed by Maurice Allais to show an inconsistency of actual observed choices with the predictions of expected utility theory. The Allais paradox demonstrates that individuals rarely make rational decisions consistently when required to do so immediately.
Traditional game theory is a primarily normative theory as it seeks to pinpoint the decision that rational players should choose, but does not attempt to explain why that decision was made. [14] Rationality is a primary assumption of game theory, so there are not explanations for different forms of rational decisions or irrational decisions.
Independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) is an axiom of decision theory which codifies the intuition that a choice between and should not depend on the quality of a third, unrelated outcome . There are several different variations of this axiom, which are generally equivalent under mild conditions.