Any quick one-liners or easy-to-understand wisdom that you've gained from the material? The entire subject area looks immensely fascinating, yet very dense at times.
The basic components of any coordination/cooperation problem are the same: you have actors with preferences, you have a situation with rules that they can't change, and you have outcomes with payoffs/penalties depending on whether the actors choose to cooperate or not.
Most of the problems revolve around how to get people to cooperate, when defection is attractive for some reason. Most of the solutions involve making sure situations are not one-off interactions, that all actors have information about what each other is doing, and that in the case of multiple actors using common resources, you need to have some form of monitoring and enforcement.
If actions are one-off, the temptation to act selfishly is higher than if actors know they are in a long-term situation in which they must choose to cooperate or defect time and time again. In this way information such as reputation can then function as a signaling device to other actors.
Games such as the Prisoner's Dilemma work only when presented as a one-off situation in which both actors have no information about what they other is going to do. So the solution is 1) make sure you're not setting up one-off interactions, and 2) make such actors are in an information rich environment wherein they can make appropriate signals about their intentions and past behavior.
Most of the other games, such as Tragedy of the Commons or Battle of the Sexes, have stable solutions if you repeat them and increase the information available to the actors. The equilibrium solutions are called Nash Equilibriums, after John Nash, the paranoid schizophrenic mathematician featured in the movie A Beautiful Mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash,_Jr.
A bit more than a one-liner, but hopefully this helps a bit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons
This documentary enlightens a bit on the subject and is quite accessible. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_%28television_document...
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=404227395387111085#
(AFAIK not released outside of Britain due to footage rights issues, a real shame.)
The upshot: In some markets, like consumer electronics, supply and demand regulates things very efficiently. In others, unconstrained individual interest can ruin everything.
In the financial markets, individuals acting rationally for themselves can cause damage to the overall economy: crashes, bubbles, bank runs, etc.
Or, everyone follows their self interest and realizes that they will need to work out some agreements to moderate fishing or there will be no fish.
This can have downsides, namely the sort of "credentialism" that's often derided on this site (licensing for interior decorators, etc.) All the players in some industry decide that it's in their best interest to appeal for regulation which will prevent others from entering this industry.
That people may slowly stab themselves in the foot repeatedly is more likely.
The overfishing problem isn't a hypothetical example, it's a real problem that has caused problems all over the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfishing#Instances_of_overfi...
The problem is that even if 90% of the fishers in an area are responsible, the remaining 10% can ruin it for everyone. And no one has any incentive, other than their conscience, to cooperate. And that's why it's a tricky problem.