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I just returned from a vacation and wanted to add a comment to those 
advanced  
by others on the origin of the prisoner's dilemma argument and its uses in  
the social sciences. 
 
One of the earliest and clearest appreciations of the Prisoner's Dilemma is 
in Hobbes'  writings, and especially the Leviathan.  Here he refers to a 
law  
of nature that individuals in a state of nature are compelled by their  
emotional fear of sudden violent death to employ reason to find a way out 
of  
their awful situation.  It is discovered that it is rational to lay down a  
person's claims to all things and the bodies of other persons but only on 
the  
condition that each has an adequate reason to believe that others will 
behave  
the same way.  In the absence of such mutual assurance each person is  
permitted  (that is, authorized by natural law) to use all methods of 
warfare  
including force and fraud.  Fraud means that one might fake a willingness 
to  
lay down such claims to goad the other player into doing so first and 
thereby  
conquering and grabbbing away his possessions. The cheater's payoff in the  
P/D model. 
 
In the absence of such reassurance that others will keep their mutual  
promises, the state of nature remains as Hobbes described it ---nasty 
brutish  
and short.  Each play er remains armed to the hilt afraid to lay down his  
arms.  In the state of nature we have a status quo solution---the  stubborn 
Nash equilibrium. 
 
The logic of the P/D haunted Hobbes and led him to realize that only with 
the  
appearance of a sovereign power ( a awesome actor who has not entered into  
any mutual agreement with the "prisoners" and stands outside the contract  
with the intent and power to keep all men and women to their promises) does 
it finally become  psychologically safe  for the isolated individuals to 
exit  
form the state of nature and enter into society.   Hobbes writes of a  
commodious life (a prosperous life) becoming finally an option but only 
after  
a sovereign power is established to keep all men and women to their 
promises.  
 Hobbes did not explain why the sovereign power would be motivated to provide  
the conditions for a market-style prosperity with laws favoring the  
toleration of foreign merchants, agricultural investments encouraged by  
property rights, cultural achievements and transportation innovations  (map 
making is referred to) but these details about the rational dictator were  
added later by members of the Public Choice school such as Buchanan, 
Tullock  
and most recently by Olson in his last and very stimulating book "Power and 
Prosperity" and applied most creatively to the Russian state in our time. 
 
Since trusting someone to lay down his arms when he is deceiving you about  
his true intentions with rhetoric and skilfull gestures carries with it a  
death-sentence payoff, this sort of P/D ---the one dramatized by Hobbes in  
his writings---cannot be escaped by repetition and the adoption of "tit for 
tat" strategies.   Neither will better methods of  verbal communication  
between the "prisoners" solve the problem since the whole point of the 
State  
of Nature is that force and fraud are welcomed devices for prolonging life  
and actors can fake their words  (Hobbes's example of the "fool" explores  
this logic).   Promises are but words or tools for "utlility maximization"  
and not true indexes of human plans and motivations.  
 
For the record I want to insist that a similar appreciation of the P/D   
problem informs Hume's Treatise.  Hume (following Hobbes but not  
acknolwedging his debt to Hobbes for practical reasons) distinguished 
between  
what voluntary agreement (tacit assent) could achieve in small groups  
compared with large groups.  This distinction between what is possible in  
small groups and why what is possible in small groups is not possible in  
large groups is crucial to certain strands of thought in modern economics  
from problem surrounding the "core"  in competition theory, to the origin 
of  
public choice economics, bargaining costs, to an appreciation of certain  
types of transaction cost economics.  In large groups, a strong central 
power  
is needed in both in Hume and in Hobbes--- voluntary contracting or tacit  
assent will not work in large groups because reputation effects become  
difficult to detect!    Adam Smith continues these discussions in several  
places including his Lectures as well. 
 
I can send anyone who is interested some essays that I wrote on these  
subjects published several decades ago but I still remain interested in 
this  
strand of thinking in economics.  I had a short correspondence with Mancur  
Olson on some of these issues about Hobbes and the P/D problem.  Olson like 
Jim Buchanan extends Hobbes' scientific approach in new directions making a 
more inclusive social science possible.     
 
Obviously, if we take a broader view of economics as dealing with the  
structures that make market trading possible and promise-keeping credible,  
then it is not difficult to push the origins of modern economics back to at 
least Hobbes and possibly earlier still depending always on definitions of  
what economics  as a social science is all about.   As Jevons, Weber, Mises 
and others have maintained economics is part of a broader sociology and the 
boundaries between the "disciplines" are fuzzy and always worth rethinking  
and perhaps redrawing. 
 
 
Laurence S. Moss 
 
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