Person
Melvin Dresher
American mathematician at the RAND Corporation.
- Dates
- 1911–1992
Connections 2
worked at
- RAND Corporation mathematician Scholarship & press 1
developed
- Prisoner's dilemma 1950 Scholarship & press 1
Timeline 2 dates
- 1911–1992 Melvin Dresher
- 1950 Melvin Dresher developed Prisoner's dilemma
Proof 1 source
-
Prisoner's Dilemma (entry, first published 1997, revised 24 Oct 2025), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 24 Oct 2025.
Scholarship & press
Flood and Dresher were among a group of now-famous mathematicians and others from academia recruited by the Rand Corporation after World War II to think about military tactics and strategy in a scientific way.
The “discovery” of the prisoner’s dilemma is usually attributed to Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher.
In early 1950, they conducted an experiment in which they persuaded a couple of their professional colleagues to play a game with the payoff structure of the prisoner’s dilemma one hundred times in succession.
The illustrative story with prison sentences as payoffs is due to Albert Tucker, who wanted to make the ideas behind Flood and Dresher’s game more accessible to an audience of Stanford psychologists.
Page history 1 change
- Tell Santa Monica's story and link entries to their stories (0.4.0)8f57652
Something wrong or missing? Tell us, with a source, or edit this page.