what are some ways to combat the prisoner s dilemma 
solutions to prisoner s dilemmas focus on overcoming individual incentives in favor of the common good in the real world most economic and other human interactions are repeated more than once this allows parties to choose strategies that reward cooperation or punish defection over time another solution relies on developing formal institutional strategies to alter the incentives that individual decision makers face finally behavioral biases will likely develop over time that undermine rational individual choice in prisoner s dilemmas and lead groups of individuals to irrationally choose outcomes that are actually the most beneficial to all of them together can the prisoner s dilemma be useful to society prisoners dilemma problems can sometimes actually make society better off as a whole a prime example is the behavior of an oil cartel all cartel members can collectively enrich themselves by restricting output to keep the price of oil at a level where each maximizes revenue received from consumers but each cartel member individually has an incentive to cheat on the cartel and increase output to also capture revenue away from the other cartel members the end result is not the optimal outcome that the cartel desires but rather an outcome that benefits the consumer in terms of lower oil prices 