prisoners-dilemma

prisoners-dilemma is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from deciqAI/knowledge-skills. It costs 147 tokens per session (2,575 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A model of situations where each person benefits individually from acting against the group’s interest, so everyone ends up worse off. It explains problems such as price wars, arms races, and overuse of shared resources.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to examine competition, partnerships, negotiations, advertising races, shared resources, and other situations where mutual cooperation would produce a better result.
Why use it?
It shifts attention from blaming people to changing the incentives that make cooperation difficult.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to examine competition, partnerships, negotiations, advertising races, shared resources, and other situations where mutual cooperation would produce a better result.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/prisoners-dilemma
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add deciqAI/knowledge-skills --skill prisoners-dilemma
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/deciqAI/knowledge-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for prisoners-dilemma

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/prisoners-dilemma/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/prisoners-dilemma)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/prisoners-dilemma"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/prisoners-dilemma/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for prisoners-dilemma

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/prisoners-dilemma"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/prisoners-dilemma.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 147 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,575 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00147 $0.02575
Opus 5 $0.00073 $0.01288
Sonnet 5 $0.00029 $0.00515
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00258

Measured 9d ago against content hash 54f9df519031, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

prisoners-dilemma scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

prisoners-dilemma/SKILL.md · 125 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 125 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Prisoner's Dilemma

Overview

Whatever the other party does, each player is individually better off defecting — so both defect, and both end up worse than mutual cooperation. This is the structural skeleton beneath price wars, arms races, overfishing, and ad spend spirals. The problem is never character; it is structure. Exhortations to cooperate fail. Change the matrix.

Composes with: second-order-thinking for matrix redesign · expected-value-and-kelly for probabilistic payoffs · repeated-games-reputation for the iterated-game case.

When to Use

  • Two or more parties would each do better cooperating, but cooperation keeps failing to materialize
  • Situation involves price competition, capacity races, advertising arms races, or commons-style resource depletion
  • You are about to negotiate or enter a partnership and want to know whether the structure makes betrayal individually rational
  • Someone asks directly about "prisoner's dilemma," "tragedy of the commons," "race to the bottom," or "Nash equilibrium"
  • A present-day competitive sprint is in play — an AI capex / compute arms race, AI-safety release race, or AI-native land-grab where every player feels forced to move fast despite preferring collective restraint

When NOT to use: zero-sum games · pure coordination problems (Schelling) · long transparent repeated game with established reputations (use repeated-games-reputation) · low-stakes reversible decisions

Coaching Novices (Adaptive Front Door)

  • Engine mode: user has a concrete case → run The Process directly.
  • Coach mode: user is unfamiliar or has no concrete case → guide step by step.

In Coach mode, respond one step at a time. Each [WAIT] is a hard stop — output only that step's question, then stop.

  1. One-line what-it-is (≤2 sentences): some situations look like "people being stubborn" but are actually a structural trap — given the rules, defecting is individually rational, and exhorting people to cooperate won't work; you have to change the structure.
  2. Check fit against When to Use / When NOT to use. If it's zero-sum or pure coordination, point elsewhere.
  3. Elicit their real situation. Get a concrete case (a partnership, a market, a negotiation). > [WAIT — do not advance until user responds]
  4. Run The Process one step at a time with their input — payoff matrix first, then dominant-strategy reasoning, then escape options. > [WAIT — do not advance until user responds]
  5. Close by naming the one escape mechanism that fits their situation — repetition, reputation, enforcement, or matrix-change — and why that one rather than the others. > [WAIT — do not advance until user responds]

Read the full file on GitHub · 125 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 125 lines · 147 tokens per session scan A 54f9df519031

Subscribe to this mod's changes

prisoners-dilemma is a skill published in the GitHub repository deciqAI/knowledge-skills (10 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 147 tokens to every session and 2,575 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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