Win as much as you can

This is the first game that we play in a group. It was Valentin, Frederik, Anthony and Adriana and me playing as one person. We could all either play X or Y and depending on the comination of the four outcomes we would win or lose points.

When there were bonus rounds playing together would made us each win points. However if one was to derive from the mutual strategy he could gain more and make us lose. In the first bonus round (*3) we playied together and everyone won. For the second bonus round however Anthony and Frederik did play in their own interest ad made many points while Valentin and Adriana and me lost. We blamed them and so in the last bonus round (*10) we did not trust them any more which made us all lose many points.

We ended up with a group result of -39 points as where ideally when playing together each of the rounds we could have gotten an overall result of 100 points.

While the game promises long term gains that are much higher when cooperating than when playing on your own, the fact that in the short run the gain of one person can be quite high on the expense of the others is very tempting. That is actually the prisonner's dilemma of game theory. 

The person playing on his/her own will not be able to do that repeatedly, since trust will be lost. This game shows how important trust is when negotiation as a group. And also how easily trust can be lost and diffically built up again.

How do we build trust?

I think we build trust by doing what we announce to do. By doing so the other person knows what to expect and that he/she can rely on what is said. A measure to build trust in this game would have been to take away all the X cards so that every one could be sure that the others would really play Y.

How to repair trust?

Repairing trust is much more difficult. I think the person who abused the trust before needs to make a great effort and repeatedly demonstrate that he/she can be trusted again. However when negotiation the lack of trust can be very costly.