The Locker Room Dilemma

After a long, hard day of practice, it is always a great feeling to retire to the locker room. I’m exhausted, super sweaty, and all I want to do is catch a break. Once inside, I know that all of the physically taxing work is now done for the day. I finally get the chance to hang out, relax with my friends, grab some food for recovery, and best of all, hop into a nice, refreshing shower.

The shower is quite possibly the best feature of the locker room because of a billion reasons. Some of the reasons include: perfect consistency, perfect temperature, and it keeps the water bill low for my apartment (which is a great way for me to save money). I always look forward to hopping in, and once in, it seems impossible to hop out. It’s one of the best ways to recover after a long workout and to really just take a deep breath. With all the great things being said about this mythic shower, there is one caveat. If someone uses the bathroom at the same time as someone using a shower, the water becomes scolding hot, and it makes taking a shower unbearable. I’m not talking about a slight raise in temperature, I am speaking of an inferno. We’ve tried to combat the situation, but ultimately, every single system conceived did not come to fruition. That’s when I realized our team was experiencing a prisoner’s dilemma scenario.

Locker Room Dilemma Player A vs Player B à (A,B)	Accept (B)	Defect (B)
Accept (A)	(2,2)	(-2,3)
Defect (A)	(3,-2)	(1,1)

The table above shows the prisoner’s dilemma. Our pact was this- whenever someone is in the shower, then you must wait to use the bathroom in order to save the said person in the shower from burning. The flaw here is the pact also gives an incentive for people to defect. There is greater utility to be obtained by defecting, and this makes defecting the dominant strategy. The person defecting has the benefit to both use the bathroom at any time and not worry about being burned by the shower. Because both Players will choose to defect, this becomes the Nash Equilibrium because both players know the other’s dominant strategy, and there is no benefit to them changing their strategies.

There is only one strategy that I can come up with to ensure full cooperation of the system. We can express our frustration with those who do not follow the pact, and by venting our frustration, we give an incentive not to defect.