Chapter seventeen Enlarging the shadow of the future: avoiding conflict and conserving fish Paul J.B. Hart In all of man's written record there has been a preoccupation with conflict of interest; possibly only the topics of god, love and inner struggle have received comparable attention. Luce and Raiffa (1957) ABSTRACT Conflict of interest among fishers characterizes most fisheries and leads to competition for the resource. This puts a premium on present actions and discounts the future. As a result, most common-property fisheries inex- orably move toward overexploitation. It is proposed here that the iterated prisoner's dilemma (PD) captures the essence of the conflict between present actions and the need for conservation. The iterated PD is outlined and the 'tit-for-tat' (TFT) strategy is explained. This proposes that players should cooperate on the first move and then do whatever the other player did on the previous move. It has been shown in computer tournaments that TFT is most often the highest score in the iterated PD, even though it does not win every time. To illustrate how the iterated PD may serve as a model for fisheries, it is used to interpret the interactions of crabbers, Reinventing Fisheries Management. Edited by Tony J. Pitcher. Paul J.B. Hart and Daniel Pauly. Published in 1998 by Kluwer Academic Publishers. London. ISBN 0 412 83410 3.