A closer look
Overthinking is the ultimate killer of mutual prosperity. The Centipede Game involves two players taking turns deciding whether to take a small reward now or pass it to the other person, which increases the total pool. If you trust the other person to keep passing, you both get incredibly rich. However, backwards induction proves that the last person to act will definitely take the final massive pot, meaning the second-to-last person should betray them first, causing a chain reaction where hyper-logical players end the game immediately with tiny rewards.
