Also known as destructive defection, a situation in game theory involving a group where individual incentives produce a suboptimal outcome for all participants. An intuitive illustration is a theater or concert: an individual audience member can get a better view by standing up from his seat, but then the person behind him will be forced to stand up, and so on until everyone is standing and the view is no better than before.
Need a Coordination Mechanism often to avoid.
In some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse.