A business version of the prisoner’s dilemma: A teaching technique

The “prisoner’s dilemma” is an archetypal choice dilemma widely used for teaching and research in the social sciences. A version of the prisoner’s dilemma which set the problem in an ordinary business context was used as a pedagogic instrument with graduate business students, fully employed and aspiring to upward mobility, and nurses—both male and female—employed at various supervisory levels. The site was a college in metropolitan Detroit. The method engages students in verbal expression, explanation, and justification of their choices and thus departs from mainstream research which treats the prisoner’s dilemma mainly in mathematical terms, usually based upon experiments requiring many iterative choices. Also, whereas the prisoner’s dilemma places the subjects in the frame of mind of being prisoners, this version is of choice-making by free people, with the additional unspecified choice available of not to play the game. Replication outcomes were similar enough to support tentative generalization, although statistical analysis was not significant because of the small number of cases. Results suggest that the method may be useful to managers in their analysis of ethical choice situations and development of alternate scenarios. Vivid lessons regarding the ethical dimensions of business behavior can be learned from the use of the prisoner’s dilemma.