prisoners-dilemma-and-cooperation

prisoners-dilemma-and-cooperation is a skill for Claude Code from fatihguner/foreman. It costs 105 tokens per session (4,324 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An explanation of the Prisoner's Dilemma and related situations where individually sensible choices produce a worse result for everyone. It also covers price wars, shared-resource problems, and ways cooperation can become possible.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to analyse price wars, competition over shared resources, mistrust between partners, and situations where cooperation is difficult but beneficial.
Why use it?
It helps explain why competitors, partners, or groups may keep making choices that damage all of them. Understanding the incentives and constraints can reveal ways to avoid that pattern.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the foreman plugin — 142 skills, 60 commands, 7 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to analyse price wars, competition over shared resources, mistrust between partners, and situations where cooperation is difficult but beneficial.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/fatihguner/foreman/prisoners-dilemma-and-cooperation
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 fatihguner/foreman --skill prisoners-dilemma-and-cooperation
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/fatihguner/foreman

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install foreman, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 142 skills, 60 commands, 7 agents.

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-and-cooperation

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fatihguner/foreman/prisoners-dilemma-and-cooperation/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/fatihguner/foreman/prisoners-dilemma-and-cooperation)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/fatihguner/foreman/prisoners-dilemma-and-cooperation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fatihguner/foreman/prisoners-dilemma-and-cooperation/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-and-cooperation

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/fatihguner/foreman/prisoners-dilemma-and-cooperation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fatihguner/foreman/prisoners-dilemma-and-cooperation.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 105 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,324 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 $0.00105 $0.04324
Opus 5 $0.00053 $0.02162
Sonnet 5 $0.00021 $0.00865
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00432

Measured 6d ago against content hash e1cb1fbd9c25, 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-and-cooperation 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 6d 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.

plugins/foreman/skills/prisoners-dilemma-and-cooperation/SKILL.md · 231 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 231 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Read runtime and advisory rules before applying this skill. Other Foreman layers and the catalog are in ../../content/, relative to this SKILL.md.

Prisoner's Dilemma and Cooperation

BETRAYAL MATH. Two rational people, acting in pure self-interest, will consistently choose the option that hurts them both. This is not a paradox of human psychology -- it is a mathematical certainty. The Prisoner's Dilemma, formulated by Albert Tucker in 1950, demonstrates that individual rationality and collective rationality can be fundamentally opposed. Every price war, every race-to-the-bottom in a crowded market, every cofounder relationship that collapses into mutual suspicion follows the same structural logic. Understanding why the trap exists is the first step toward escaping it. The second step -- and the one most entrepreneurs skip -- is recognizing which structural conditions make escape possible and which make it impossible.


The Framework

The Classic Prisoner's Dilemma

Two suspects are arrested. The police separate them and offer each the same deal:

Suspect B: Stay Silent Suspect B: Confess
Suspect A: Stay Silent Both serve 1 year A serves 10 years, B goes free
Suspect A: Confess A goes free, B serves 10 years Both serve 8 years

The logic is merciless. If B stays silent, A is better off confessing (freedom vs. 1 year). If B confesses, A is still better off confessing (8 years vs. 10 years). Confessing is the dominant strategy for both. The Nash equilibrium is (Confess, Confess) -- both serve 8 years. Yet both would prefer (Silent, Silent) -- 1 year each. Individual rationality destroys collective benefit.

This structure is not an abstract curiosity. It is the default architecture of competition.

The Entrepreneur's Prisoner's Dilemma: Price Wars

Translate the matrix into business terms. Two competing SaaS companies serving the same market must choose between maintaining prices and cutting prices.

Read the full file on GitHub · 231 lines

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. 6d ago First seen · 231 lines · 105 tokens per session scan A e1cb1fbd9c25

Subscribe to this mod's changes

prisoners-dilemma-and-cooperation is a skill published in the GitHub repository fatihguner/foreman (50 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 105 tokens to every session and 4,324 once invoked, about $0.0005 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 2026-09-06.

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