ATAGWKU

The "social dilemma" is another term of art in the social sciences to describe the situations that inevitably arise from the tension between self-interest and collective gain

Peter Kollock's words "individual rationality adds up to collective irrationality,"

2010 Nobel laureate in economics, Elinor Ostrom, detailed the ways in which people have worked around or mitigated social dilemmas in order to create institutions for collective action.

Robert Axelrod was concerned about the strategic gameplaying involved with thermonuclear strategy during the cold war, and also curious about why cooperation evolved in a competitive Darwinian environment, so he asked people to program cooperation games that computers could play

Ostrom, Axelrod, and Kollock could define the foundation for a new interdiscipline of cooperation studies.