Coordination cooperation games

From this, mutual cooperation can emerge and become collectively stable. Read: What is Nakamoto Consensus? An equilibrium state as such can only be achieved with effective self-policing mechanisms. Axelrod came to his conclusion that cooperation based on reciprocity is collectively stable. In essence, it cannot be invaded by another strategy, such as defection. This stable state is achieved only if that shadow of the future looms large enough to impact each interaction and defection by players is punished.

Mutual cooperation between players in Bitcoin emerged with its inception. It was initially very low profile and relegated to cypherpunks and enthusiasts who were interested in its use case and decided to help facilitate the network.

Further, the payoff for acting maliciously in its early stages was simply not worth the cost. While defection by a malicious actor in the short-term may have been successful, the vast majority of those involved in the early stages were invested in the longer term success of the concept purely out of interest or financial hopes.

Specifically, a strategy based on mutual cooperation is the dominant strategy for stability and has an ability to permeate a group of other strategies due to the fact that it is more beneficial in terms of payoff to cooperate with other players in the long-term than it is to defect, so long as the situation is an iterated dilemma. As demonstrated, this is the case with a decentralized network utilizing PoW as its consensus model such as Bitcoin.

So, in the case of Bitcoin mining , a majority of the miners in the network could be acting maliciously defecting , however, in the long run, this is simply not effective as the cost becomes too unbearable. The malicious miners would be better off cooperating with the rest of the network. Eventually, the smaller minority of miners coordinating with each other would achieve an overall higher payoff among each other, and that higher payoff would have subsequent effects on the malicious miners, thus eventually changing their strategy to one of cooperation.

Read: Guide to Bitcoin Mining Rewards. Once cooperation based on reciprocity is established in a population, it can protect itself from invasion by uncooperative strategies. The payoff from cooperating in a system such as Bitcoin is higher than defecting, so the strategy of cooperation becomes collectively stable. For this to happen, little needs to be assumed about the individuals involved or the social setting. Players do not even need to communicate, and there is no need to assume trust between the players, the use of mutual cooperation as the dominant strategy can make defection unproductive and extremely costly.

The evolution of cooperation within the system allows the successful strategy to thrive even if the players do not know why or how. Breathing pauses are allowed. One player is chosen who has good self confidence. All players walk about the room, shaking hands, greeting one another, and hugging each other. Special Tip: There should already be a high level of trust in the group. No player should be chosen for this role who is not fully part of the group. A few players find themselves in a balloon that begins to sink.

Everything that could be thrown overboard has been thrown overboard. Now it must be decided which player will jump overboard. This games purpose is discussion and the art of discussion. Who is more important and how and against whom will the majority vote. As soon as a majority is reached, the chosen player must jump out.

Then the next round begins. At the end of the game, everyone discusses what happened. How did the individual players behave, and how did they argue for and against each other?

Group relationships and the role of the individuals in the group can be clearly noted. Care should be taken that no one is insulted or hurt by any comments that could be made. One player from each of three teams Apple, Lemon, Orange is blindfolded and walks up to a table where apples, lemons, and oranges have been placed. The players can only take the fruit of their team and place it in their basket. The other players in their teams can call out and direct the player to the right fruit.

Groups of two players each are made. Either between the backs of the hands, or index fingers, or knees, a beer coaster or a piece of paper, or a pen, or a block of wood is held between the two players. Both players must move through the room without the object falling.

The better the players can coordinate and react to their moves, the bolder the tasks can become. The game can also be played blindfolded. The group sits on a blanket. The blanket can be folded so that there is only enough room for all players increases difficulty of game. Now the group must turn the blanket without getting off of it. The players form a line like a long snake. Everyone takes a leg of the player in front of him and holds it in his hand.

Then everyone hops at the same time after the first player who is a leader hops. A pole broomstick handle lays on the fingers of the players and must be lowered without any player letting go of the pole. All players stand in a circle. Then they all walk to the middle until there is no more room. They close their eyes and hold the hand of another player.

The knot must now be undone, making one or more circles, without letting go of the hands. The group can build something using the materials, but speaking is not allowed. You will need a large pullover for this game. The first person pulls the pullover on, on the signal and grabs the hands of the next member of the group. The rest of the group members then help the first person to remove the jumper and pull it onto the next player without them releasing their hands.

How long will the group need for the pullover to be passed on to all of the players? In this co-operation game, the whole group is only allowed to touch a meter stick with one stretched out finger. The meter stick can be lifted and lowered while the group tries to make it through an obstacle course. A referee watches over the proceedings to check that all group members remain in contact wither the stick. Each member of the team receives a spoon and a bowl of muesli. Everyone sits at a round table.

One arm is held behind the back and the other can only be moved in a 90 degree angle. In this position, it is impossible for someone to feed themselves. The emptying of the bowls only works if the neighbours feed each other. A referee makes sure that everyone keeps their arms at a 90 degree angle.

A blindfolded player must now to make it through the playing field without being caught in one of the mousetraps. The other team members guide him through the field by shouting instructions from the edge of the area. The players should wear stable shoes for this game. A safety ribbon is used to cordon off the area which is not allowed to be entered. You can use a pot, bottle or box as a platform as the bomb. This is then lifted up on 4 strings, is transported 20 meters without touching the ground and is laid down in a target area.

Several swimmers must be saved. The lifeguard throws a rope to a member of the group who ties the rope around himself and lets himself be pulled in by the lifeguard. Then the rope is thrown to the next person who is also hauled in. How quickly will the group manage to all be safely back on land? In this co-ordination game, one player stands with each foot on a board. A rope is tied to both boards. The player lifts on leg, the group pulls the board along a little and the player puts his leg down again.

How long will the group need to transport their player over a marked out distance? A referee makes note of any contact with the ground and deducts points. Both players must now roll a certain distance over the ground with their feet in permanent contact.

The aim of this game is for both partners to stay in contact and to communicate with each other they will make to the end of the course. A stone or a large ball must be moved from A to B. The group is only allowed to use strings.

It is inherently less flexible than outcome accountability, making it difficult to improvise and incorporate feedback loops to inform better strategy in changing environments.

Thus, a hybrid of outcome accountability and process accountability is optimal, balancing out weaknesses while not decreasing the respective benefits of each method. A hybrid of outcome goals and process goals should give teams the ability to remain flexible while ensuring knowledge transfer and inhibiting potential abuses of power.

Importantly, this hybrid accountability can ensure that standard practices are met, but also encourage experimentation with novel strategies. This ensures collective knowledge is not discarded and adaptive prowess are not discouraged — both of which are essential components for designing secure systems and responding to incidents.

Creating stretch outcome goals can encourage innovation, allowing teams to stretch their metaphorical wings and attempt ambitious plans — tempered with the need to still be able to justify process. For example, a security-related stretch goal might be to create a tool to automate asset inventory management, whereas the basic goal may be to perform manual asset inventory management.

Importantly, process goals should apply equally to infosec and to DevOps. Infosec should justify why they made a less business-friendly decision — helping curb the FUD-driven decision-making to which infosec is prone. DevOps should justify why they made a less secure decision — helping curb the tendency to treat security as an afterthought. By forcing each team to articulate their justifications, it allows the opportunity to, as the kids say, call out bullshit.

Finally, how these goals are communicated is consequential to winning the coordinative game. Drawing from the aforementioned study involving goal conflict between curative or palliative care, there are a few lessons to glean towards how to set goals. First, the study found that participants who received messaging emphasizing the conflicting nature of the goals reported increased perception of goal conflict and decreased importance of palliative care, as expected Instead, the opposite was shown to be true.

Unfortunately, self-affirmation can also deactivate less valued or more difficult goals, becoming a reinforcement mechanism for moral hazard-driven beliefs. These results certainly seem discouraging! So, what can be done? The key takeaway is that goals must be presented as complementary rather than conflicting, particularly when there is evidence to support it as is true with the complementary nature of palliative and curative care.

When considering infosec and DevOps goals, I have long argued that their respective goals bear far more similarities than differences We must also include the ordering of goals in our calculus here. Sequential goal pursuit is inevitable given the relative scarcity of solutions that can accomplish multiple goals, and in light of the tendency for people to prioritize one goal over another.

However, concurrent goal pursuit can still be encouraged. DevOps and infosec teams can make a list of their respective goals and perform an exercise to brainstorm where goals from each side might be achieved through the same means. As an example, tools designed to collect data for performance use cases are collecting data valuable for security use cases as well. For instance, a database monitoring tool can help accomplish both performance and security goals, thus running the risk of invoking the dilution of instrumentality.

To re-anchor perception to reality, you can express how the tool relates to each goal specifically: collecting data on resource utilization for performance, and detecting abnormal query behavior for security. The relationship between DevOps and information security must be healthy for the business to thrive.

This relationship, like all relationships, requires work, and understanding it as a cooperative game involving information asymmetry can inform how we can work smarter to nurture it. By leveraging team reasoning, hybrid goals outcome and process , and framing goals as complementary and concurrent, we become a strong contender for winning this coordinative game.

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Goals as excuses or guides: The liberating effect of perceived goal progress on choice. Journal of Consumer Research, 32 3 , Zhang, Y. The dilution model: How additional goals undermine the perceived instrumentality of a shared path.

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Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22 9 , One such example is in the study by Lambsdorff, et al. Coordination games with asymmetric payoffs: An experimental study with intra-group communication.

Lambsdorff, J. Team reasoning—Experimental evidence on cooperation from centipede games. PloS one, 13 11 , e Chang, W. Accountability and adaptive performance under uncertainty: A long-term view. Skitka, L. Does automation bias decision-making?.