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> You'll take your target down, but you'll also end up at a disadvantage relative to someone who just stayed out of it.

This is touching more on game theory and behavioral economics. And we know how the Prisoner's Dilemma is solved. :P




The iterated prisoner's dilemma's optimal solution is tit-for-tat, which is a "nice" strategy in that it never defects first. In game-theory tournaments where bots play off an iterated prisoner's dilemma against multiple opponents, the "naughty" strategies get crushed because they eventually encounter a provocable strategy and get caught in a defect loop, running themselves into the ground while the "nice" strategies dominated. This is the situation closest to the startup ecosystem. See eg. The Evolution of Cooperation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation#A...




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