Introduction

A pervasive feature of social interaction is the conflict between an individual’s motive to maximize personal interests and the motive to maximize collective interests. The two-person prisoner’s dilemma, is a special case of a social dilemma. Another important class of social dilemmas is called a social trap. As in the case of a social trap, the public goods paradigm involves two types of outcomes: a short-term and a delayed outcome. The term mixed-motive game was first introduced by Thomas Schelling, an economist, to refer to situations in which an individual is faced with a conflict between the motive to compete and the motive to cooperate. According to J. W. Thibaut and H. H. Kelley, the zero-sum game represents an extreme situation in which outcomes are completely noncorrespondent. To illustrate the nature of interdependence with outcome matrices, the chapter shows what a matrix would look like in a simple case of two-person interaction.