Theories Of Game Theory

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The game that represents the behavior of the athletes with doping is the prisoner’s dilemma, which lies within game theory. Game theory “deals with the conflicts of interest between parties who know each other’s preferences but not their actual intentions or decisions, and deduces the best course of action for any rational player.” The main characteristic of game theory is that the result that comes out of the game is dependent on what both players do, which is referred to as strategic interaction, and game theory aims to analyze these situations. In the original prisoner’s dilemma, that would be to confess or to deny, the outcomes then depend on whether they cooperate or defect, which can be seen in Figure 1.1 below: The corresponding outcomes to this are as follows: If both confess, they each get 4 months in jail. If P1 confesses and P2 denies, P1 doesn’t get any jail time, while P2 gets 8 months in jail. If P1 denies and P2 …show more content…

Even though both players would be better off if none of them takes drugs, as they don’t trust each other, they would both resort to doping so that they can win. If we assume that we have two tennis athletes that are choosing whether to resort to doping or not to win a tournament, we can analyze the situation using game theory. If the two athletes were on the same “level playing field,” their winnings would be a total of £20 each, while the value of winning the singles tournament would be £200, the probability of winning for the athlete that uses performance enhancers is 100%, the value of playing tennis for one year professionally would be £20, the cost of being caught doping would be 10%, while the cost for being removed from a team would be £20, and the probability that a clean tennis player would be removed from a team simply because he is no longer at the level to be competitive would be 50%, we see that the following prisoner’s dilemma emerges, as seen in Table

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