Too Many Dilemmas

Consider this fictional situation – you and your best buddy Andy, decides to rob the bank in during the bleak economic situation. To accomplish this heist, it requires both your expertise as a “professional getaway driver” and Andy as the “security electronics expert” and therefore neither can successfully pull of the robbery without the other. If either decides to proceed without the other, the chances of failure would be 100%, resulting in a -100 payoff. However, if neither decides to show up for the robbery as planned, nobody earns any money and therefore the payoff would be 0 for both you and Andy. Nevertheless, if both you and Andy shows up as planned and successfully reach the vault of cash, you both earn the figure X and Y whereby X,Y are positive.

However, upon reaching the cash, depending on Andy’s expertise, you may or may not trigger the silent alarm. In the case that you don’t trigger the alarm, you and Andy get away and inevitably into a huge argument as to who should receive what portion of the money. In a huge twist of plot, both you and Andy get into a Mexican standoff – Hollywood style. If neither shoots at each other, the dilemma where you and Andy would still be arguing over the proportion, X or Y amount of cash, where X and Y are positive, remains. However, if you successfully shoots Andy and dodge Andy’s gunfire, you would receive 100% of the cash and Andy would be -∞ , dead; or vice versa as illustrated in the graph below. As you can see, both would be inclined to shoot each other. Assuming that both doesn’t miss, they would both be in the situation worst off that they actually were – dead.

In the case where you and Andy DO get arrested by the police, the typical case of the prisoner’s dilemma as discussed in ECON 501 applies – both gets arrested and separately interrogated. If you confess and implicate Andy while he remains silent, you will be released scot-free while Andy gets 20 years. Same happens in Andy implicates you while you remain silent. However, if both you both confess, you and Andy would be spending about 15 years behind bars. In the case where you both don’t confess, you and Andy will only spend 6 months in prison, by which in due time when you and Andy are released, would result in the previously discussed standoff due to the inevitable argument over the proportion of money each should receive. And by all means, we could say that they would both shoot each other.

Nevertheless, both you and Andy would be inclined to confess and implicate each other and therefore would also be worst off – in this case, 15 years in prison. If we could assume that the police never found their stash of cash, it would then ALSO result in a standoff upon their release from prison.

Fortunately, from this bunch of “dilemma’s”, we can assume that whoever who decides to rob banks are unequivocally stupid. Therefore, we can conclude that this ‘dilemma of dilemmas’ should only happen in Hollywood and no mindful person should actually attempt this.