I don't see how the Prisoner's Dilemma applies here - there was no question of being sold out by the other party. Indeed, judging by the article, they would ha

I don't see how the Prisoner's Dilemma applies here - there was no question of being sold out by the other party. Indeed, judging by the article, they would have been very confident of being in the best 2 cars, which allows for a simple calculation of the expected return from signing the contract (the same principle applies if you want to break out the odds of coming 3rd, 4th and 5th too, but they don't change the result much - I leave the proof as an exercise for the reader ;) if they sign the contract and come first, they win 1.7m, if they come second they win 0.4m. If they don't sign and come first, they win 2.5m, and if they come second they win 0. How confident do you need to be about coming first to not want to sign the contract? let x be the probability that you come first, we can determine what x needs to be before signing looks appealing: x * 2.5 + (1 - x) * 0 = x * 1.7 + (1 - x) * 0.4 2.5x = 1.3x + 0.4 1.2x = 0.4 x = 0.4/1.2 = 0.333 In other words, for the contract to look attractive to them, they would have to think that they had a 33% chance or less of winning. Which considering there were only 5 cars in the race, and theirs was clearly one of the better cars, makes the contract look very unappealing.