The prisoners’ petrol dilemma

Putting aside views on the political sense behind senior government members’ recent comments on the potential fuel tanker driver strike, it’s interesting that the net result seems to have been a real-world incarnation of the classic game theory model, The Prisoner’s Dilemma.

The game, created in the 1950s by game theorists at RAND, goes something like this: two people are arrested. They are both told that they will receive a pardon if they snitch on the other. If they are snitched on, however, then they will receive a long sentence. If they both keep silent, they both receive a short sentence.

The best collective strategy is to therefore both keep quiet, but neither knows what the other will do, and so the dilemma is whether to snitch on the other or not, risking a much longer punishment if the other person snitches.

And so here we are with the potential fuel crisis. We are being told that we should take “contingency measures” to make sure we have enough fuel for our cars. However, the just-in-time delivery nature of the fuel supply chain, combined with generally low stock-piling by fuel retailers because of the historically high price of fuel, combined with the much lower number of outlets (less than 9,000 today compared with over 21,000 in 1991 according to this report) means that if we do start buying more fuel than usual then there will be a crisis because there isn’t enough spare fuel in the system to cope with purchasing much outside of the norm.

In Prisoner’s Dilemma terms, we should all keep quiet and don’t do anything out of the ordinary. Being told to take contingency measures may be enough to push us towards snitching…