🕹 Still More Games !!

Which Stranger Am I Talking with Today?

Introduction

Think about the following:

• So, would you wear a veshti/kurta/angavastram, saree/silk paavade/dhaavani to college?
• When you want someone to search the internet, what do you tell them do?
• How do you show someone, a stranger, that you agree with what they are doing at that moment?
• How do you know where the exit is in a public place?
• Where would you stage a protest? How would you get other people to join in?
• If you want a whole bunch of 20-30-something people to raise their arms up and spontaneously rock side to side?

And, what does “less than three” even mean?!!??

In the previous module on the Prisoners’ Dilemma, we saw how we all are engaged in adversarial and transactional Games with many other people, most of whom are strangers to us. But as remarked before, the Human Species is perhaps unique in that we are able to cooperate with strangers!! So we are not always adversaries or enemies, and we are able to obtain unspoken agreement and correspondence with strangers.

What use would this be? Would it be a Design Tool? How?

Today, we will study Coordination Games and Schelling Focus Points, and see how these concepts can help create better designs, businesses, and maybe, art.

The Stag Hunt

A brief Introduction to the Stag Hunt Game.

Coordination Games and Schelling Focus Points

Here is Julia Galef on the idea of Schelling Focus Points:

And here is another video on the same topic, but with a historical, and spatial, angle to it:

Focal points can be used in Coordination Games: these are activities where people’s actions tend to organize into Patterns based on specific default options. These actions could be

1. Conversation, Words, Phrases, Gestures

2. Dress

3. Travel / Meeting / Location

4. Food and Beverage Choices

5. Attention

The Payoff Matrix in SH is:

The inequalities relating the payoffs in the Stag Hunt game are:

\[ Reward > Temptation > \pmb{Punishment} > \pmb{Sucker's~ Payoff} \\\ \] There is in fact no Temptation at all! Rewards for C are always the greatest!

There are two Nash equilibria in the Stag hunt game. The CC corner is representative of both players being pro-risk and cooperating for higher reward. The DD corner is where each Player is risk-averse and prefers to work by themselves and mind their own business, without interference to, or help from, the other Player.

The Stag Hunt is a less vindictive than the Prisoners’ Dilemma and may be preferable in situations where there is not so much of an adversarial engagement as there is a tendency to maximize gains and minimize risks.

Is it better to Die than to Kill?

What game is being played here?

This is the Chicken Game (CG), where it two Players dare each other to “chicken out” and survive, when put in a very strong adversarial situation.

The Payoff Matrix in CG is:

And the inequalities that govern the Chicken game are:

\[ Temptation > Reward > \pmb{Sucker's~ Payoff} > \pmb{Punishment} \\\ \]

and as with the PD, we have: \[ R > (S + T)/2 \] Chicken Games often occur in politics and of course, in offices and organizations, where co-workers dare each other to shirk from work the longest!!

Here us a sermon on the Chicken Game. (Listen to the first few minutes for a good description of the Chicken Game.)

Schelling Points and the Lindy Effect

To be written up.

Additional Readings

1. Jim Allen(July 2, 2023). Electro Ecstasy: How Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ Changed Music. https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/donna-summer-i-feel-love-feature/

2. Presh Talwalkar.(2008) How We Naturally Organize. https://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2008/04/01/focal-points-or-schelling-points-how-we-naturally-organize-in-games-of-coordination/

3. Richard Littauer. (Feb 14, 2017). Using internal Schelling points to plan better. https://medium.com/@richlitt/using-schelling-points-to-perform-better-973243efd989

4. Ron Ashkenas.(July 26, 2011).Why Leaders Play Chicken. https://hbr.org/2011/07/why-leaders-play-chicken

5. Rapoport, A., & Chammah, A. M. (1966). The Game of Chicken. American Behavioral Scientist, 10(3), 10–28. Read here: https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1177/000276426601000303

6. Herbert Wulf.(01 March, 2023). Cooperative Security, Arms Control and Disarmament:Chicken-Game. https://toda.org/global-outlook/2023/chicken-game.html