Game Theory: Prisoner's Dilemma and the GM

 

 

There has been so much said about Pritchard and whether what he is doing is helping or hurting the team now as GM, that I've felt a need to throw out a little game theory to give some perspective regarding our current situation.

As a Political Science major in college, I studied how the Prisoner's Dilemma related to the ability and willingness of nations to work together or to work solely in their own interest at the expense of other nations.  Here is the classic Prisoner's Dilemma scenario:

Two people are arrested and placed into two separate cells. They are each encouraged to testify against the other. If each prisoner cooperates and chooses to not testify against each other they will each have a relatively short sentence. If one testifies and the other does not, then the testifier gets off with no prison time and the other gets the maximum sentence. If each testifies against each other then they each get a long prison term, but not the maximum.

In this scenario you have an incentive to cooperate because a short prison term is better than a maximum prison term, but you also have an incentive to testify against the other person because your prison term will either be shorter than the other person's or the other person already ratted you out and already proved they could not be trusted.

This basic scenario can be adjusted many different ways (using both positive and negative numbers) to represent all kinds of situations. In international politics, for instance, the many times that cooperation works is that the value of cooperation is set in a way to exceed the cost of defection.

Basketball is a different game however, but few things hold true:

1) Basketball assets (such as players) are a scarce resource.

2) The exchange of basketball resources is based in a zero-sum game. For every winner there necessarily must be a loser.

3) The movement of basketball assets can be understood as an iterated (meaning, repeated indefinitely) Prisoner's Dilemma game.

What this means:

Dealing with players as assets is problematic. Each time a team is viewed as a winner and another as a loser, resentment builds - the incentive to cooperate diminishes. In the brief time that we have had Kevin Pritchard as GM, we have been widely seen as the winner in most trades.This not only means that we have burned specific teams, but the league as a whole as well. This has been exacerbated by the Darius Miles letter, but an even greater force in games playing is being illuminated now. The balance of power has shifted into our favor, and teams would rather be uncooperative at their own disadvantage than to let us continue to improve. While this can be seen as a stupid mistake for the teams that won't trade away assets to get our assets that could potentially improve both teams, this is a particularly smart tactic long-term if the teams we are dealing with have aspirations to have success against us in the playoffs.

The anxiety about KP's unwillingness to take risks, or pushing for specific free agents that we may or may not be excited about is rooted in the problem of the NBA being structured as a zero-sum game. We understand this problem well, as we examined the Pau Gasol trade from Memphis to L.A. In this trade, Memphis upset the balance of power and appeared by all rights to be acting with a lack of self-interest.

Self-interest is the backbone of what motivates actors in the Prisoner's Dilemma, and despite the growing angst felt toward KP the reality of the game will eventually catch up with other teams. Trades will be made that will make our team better because other actors, despite their lack of desire to work with us, have to look out for their own self-interest above all. As the summer progresses, the need for teams that have a reluctance to work with the Trail Blazers to work out a deal will increase because of the unique position of power that we are in.

KP is correct not to rush into any brash/risky moves because the accumulation of power in an iterated game is not created through high risk/high reward moves. The Spurs are the classic example of this being played out to near perfection in recent years. We may not like it, and view the relative increase in strength of other teams (Cavs, Spurs, Orlando, Celtics, Lakers) as a loss of power for ourselves. This is true, to some extent, but if this is how we feel, than many other teams in the NBA feels the same way as well. The incentive to cooperate with us will increase as this reality sets in.

Have patience Blazer fans, there is plenty of summer left and the incentive to cooperate continues to grow with each day that passes.