In The Survival Game, David Barash discusses the prisoner’s dilemma as a instance of where the payoff for defecting on collaborators is better than playing nice. When such situations repeat, there are huge problems for collaborators in responding to attempts to defect. In simulations, defecting back every other time is the best available response. Not defecting back means the defector confirms the payoff, and defecting back every time means baiting and predictability.
One observation that comes to mind: it may be future defectors that most want everyone else collaborating. That is, the defector’s payoff is not something folks just stumble into–it can be constructed that way. One might think, therefore, that all the present calls for collaboration–and virtually no calls for research competition (except in “grand challenges setting”)–might set up defection payoffs.
More broadly, I’m thinking about intermittency. Might intermittent responses disrupt the defector’s incentives and expectations? Might intermittent efforts at innovation be better than systematic ones, consensus ones? Might the policy framework for innovation actually aim to set up a condition where the defector is the innovator, is the cheat on cooperation? If so, then for university IP policy, enforcing things to prevent local initiative simply because it violates the policy would utterly miss the point of setting up innovation conditions. Yes, the crass sloppy mediocre stuff–stomp it out. But the insightful, clever, opportunistic stuff–well, maybe it is from defectors on the status quo of university administration that research innovation is going to arise. That is, the technology transfer office with its insistence on process and policy and cooperation sets up the defectors’ payoff. Just that the compliance and ethics officers don’t understand this.
If this makes any sense, then one might also begin to see why policy mandating a process or system or office or “principles” (unbending requirements lofted to categorical imperatives: you will serve the policy as if it were sacred text) doesn’t make much sense for innovation relative to the status quo. If it’s the intermittency of attack that matters, then whatever the baseline processes are, the practice has to be opportunistic enough to allow local, unplanned, sporadic shots at the status quo. It’s really hard to write bureaucratic policy that condones such stuff. Consistency, regularity, and the like is so much easier to imagine than intermittent mobilization for a purpose outside the anticipated bounds of committee approved processes.