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Stag Hunt

A coordination game, formalized from Rousseau's parable of hunters who can cooperate to bring down a stag or individually defect to catch a hare, in which neither strategy dominates and the outcome depends entirely on trust in the other player. Unlike the Prisoner's Dilemma, where defection is a dominant strategy, the stag hunt's cooperation failure is a coordination and trust problem — solvable through communication or reputation rather than requiring outside enforcement.

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