Single-play trust games yield defection, but repeated play can change interests dramatically

Evidence

If the game is played only once, clearly Trifonov’s interest is to defect, and therefore the lieutenant colonel’s interest is not to make the initial loan. In many experiments using variants of this game, the first mover (the lieutenant colonel here) often risks cooperation and the second mover often reciprocates, even when the game is to be played only once (which appears to be the most common way to use the game experimentally). If the experiments were run with payoffs on the scale of what the lieutenant colonel and Trifonov faced, we might expect almost no cooperative plays in games played only once. If, however, the players were like the lieutenant colonel and Trifonov and were able to play the game repeatedly over the years, their interests might change dramatically, because both could do very well over many plays of the game. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 114

Categorization

• XREF: The single-play vs. repeated-play contrast is exactly the Luhmann/Hardin integration point: when blindness eliminates repeated observability, every interaction collapses to a single play, pushing rational players to defection — Hobbesian predation. The wife’s failure to see cheating prospective enforces the repeated-play incentives when the community itself cannot.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that experimental cooperation in one-shot games would vanish at real payoff scales, and that it is the repeatability that converts interests, is the mechanistic core the reader’s blindness-to-Hobbes argument requires.