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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.
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.
The empirical fact that subjects in most societies contribute anything in the simple public goods game is a challenge for game theory to explain via a motive of total self-interest, although it can do better with the "punishment" variant or the "iterated" variant; because some of the motivation to contribute is now purely "rational" if players ...
Rational choice theory provides a framework to explain why groups of rational individuals can come to collectively irrational decisions. For example, while at the individual level a group of people may have common interests, applying a rational choice framework to their individually rational preferences can explain group-level outcomes that ...
In philosophy and mathematics, Newcomb's paradox, also known as Newcomb's problem, is a thought experiment involving a game between two players, one of whom is able to predict the future. Newcomb's paradox was created by William Newcomb of the University of California 's Lawrence Livermore Laboratory .
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.
A simple example of a preference order over three goods, in which orange is preferred to a banana, but an apple is preferred to an orange. In economics, and in other social sciences, preference refers to an order by which an agent, while in search of an "optimal choice", ranks alternatives based on their respective utility.
Rational choice theory, a cornerstone of microeconomics, builds this postulate to model aggregate social behaviour. The expected utility hypothesis states an agent chooses between risky prospects by comparing expected utility values (i.e., the weighted sum of adding the respective utility values of payoffs multiplied by their probabilities).