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The data suggest that players should serve big on the second serve as well as their first. And distinguished psychologist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahnemann offers an explanation:
“People prefer losing late to losing early,” Daniel Kahneman, a Noble Prize-winning psychologist and professor emeritus at Princeton, wrote in an e-mail.
Some of Kahneman’s best-known research, with Amos Tversky, focused on decision-making and people’s aversion to risk, even when given identical potential outcomes.
“Imagine a game in which you have a 20 percent chance to get to the second stage and an 80 percent chance to win the prize at that stage,” Kahneman wrote. “This is less attractive than a game in which the percentages are reversed.”
But this is not an individual decision-making scenario, it is a game so we have to account for how the receiver will respond to the change in strategy by the server. One model: the receiver has a budget of effort to expend on the two serves. In the slow second serve and fast first serve scenario, he saves some effort for the second serve. Hence, the first-serve win percentage for the server is large. If the server serves hard on both serves, there is less incentive to save effort for the second serve as it is fast anyway. So, transfer effort to the first. For the server, the win percentage will go down on the first serve and up on the second. I guess the server might be worse off as result. No-one is imagining any of this is explicitly calculated by either player but perhaps learning by trial and error, a process that should work well in zero sum games, should find the optimum.
Who knows is this is realistic or formalizable. But the qualitative point is the most important: in a game when one player evaluates a change in strategy based on data, she should carefully think through the response of other players to her change.
Parallel paths meet and end on one astounding episode of The Price is Right. Beautiful writing.
Ted says that when he went back for the afternoon taping, the producers moved him to a part of the studio where the contestants couldn’t see him. He says that he has heard “through unofficial channels” that he has been banned from the Bob Barker Studio, the way casinos have started asking Terry not to play blackjack inside their walls again. That Kathy Greco gave him a “Sicilian death stare” after the show, and that nobody ever needs a three-digit PIN. That according to his database, the Big Green Egg had appeared on the show only twice — before Terry and Linda began recording it — and that it was $900 before it was $1,175. That so many contestants — not just Terry — had won that day because they had listened to him. That his only mistake came when Terry played Switch?, because Ted didn’t realize there were two bikes, and he thought that a terabyte sounded like a lot of memory. That he was edited out of the show when it aired, that he can be seen only once, shaking his head when the prize is a Burberry coat, a prize that had never before appeared on the show. Otherwise, he would have known how much it was worth, the way he knew that a Berkline Contemporary Rock-a-Lounger was worth $599, and Brandon’s Ducane gas grill was worth $1,554, and Sharon’s car was worth $18,546. And for all that knowledge, for all his devotion, Bob Barker had called him a Loyal Friend and True, and Drew Carey called him that guy in the audience.
Deerstalker display: The Browser.
In golf:
How big a deal is luck on the golf course? On average, tournament winners are the beneficiaries of 9.6 strokes of good luck. Tiger Woods’ superior putting, you’ll recall, gives him a three-stroke advantage per tournament. Good luck is potentially three times more important. When Connolly and Rendleman looked at the tournament results, they found that (with extremely few exceptions) the top 20 finishers benefitted from some degree of luck. They played better than predicted. So, in order for a golfer to win, he has to both play well and get lucky.
I don’t understand the statistics enough to evaluate this paper. Apparently they call “luck” the residual in some estimate of “skill.” What I don’t understand is how such luck can be distinguished from unexpectedly good performance. If a schlub wins a big tournament and then returns to being a schlub, is that automatically luck?
Imagine the game: you and your partner are holding opposite ends of a rope which has a ribbon hanging from the middle of it. Your goal is to keep the ribbon dangling above a certain point marked on the ground.
This game is the Tug of Peace. Unlike a tug of war, you do not want to pull harder than your partner. In fact you want to pull exactly as hard as she pulls.
That shouldn’t be too difficult. But what if you feel that she is starting to tug a little harder than at first and the ribbon starts to move away from you. You will tug back to get it back in line.
But now she feels you tugging. If she responds, it could easily escalate into an equilibrium in which each of you tugs hard in order to counteract the other’s hard tugging.
This is metaphor for many relationship dysfunctions. For no reason other than strategic uncertainty you get locked into a tug of peace in which each party is working hard to keep the relationship in balance.
There is an even starker game-theoretic metaphor. Suppose that you choose simultaneously how hard you will tug and your choice is irreversible once the tugging begins. You never know how cooperative your partner is, and so suppose there is a tiny chance that she wants the ribbon just a little bit on her side of the mark.
Ideally you would both like to tug with minimal effort just to keep the ribbon elevated. But since there is a small probability she will tug harder than that you will tug just a little harder than that too to get the ribbon centered “on average.” Now, she knows this. And whether or not she is cooperative she will anticipate your adjustment and tug a little harder herself. But then you will tug all the harder. And so on.
This little bit of incomplete information causes you both to tug as hard as you can.
Doctors are skeptical. But they should be. When I approach a doctor with symptoms he has no way of knowing how many other doctors have already examined me. On average that number is larger than zero. So the doctor should factor in the wisdom of at least that fractional number of doctors who have already given me a clean bill of health. My symptoms have to be especially bad to compensate for that automatic positive signal.
I don’t mind rejection but a lot of people do.
When I want to ask someone to join me for a coffee or lunch I always send email. And its all about rejection even though I don’t mind rejection so much. The reason is that nobody can know for sure how I deal with rejection. And almost everybody hates to reject someone who might have their feelings hurt.
If I ask face-to-face I put my friend in an awkward position. Because every second she pauses to think about it is an incremental rejection. Because while the delay could be just because she is thinking about scheduling, it also could be that she is searching for excuses to get out of it.
These considerations combined with her good graces mean that she feels pressure to say yes and to say yes quickly. Even if she really does want to go. I would rather she have the opportunity to consider it fully and I would rather not make her feel uncomfortable.
Email adds some welcome noise to the transaction. It is never common knowledge exactly when she is able to read my email invitation. If she gets it right away she can comfortably consider the offer and her schedule and get back to me on her own time. And she knows that I know that… that I have no way of knowing how much time it took her to decide.
Game theorists can’t stop trashing email as a coordination device but that’s because we always think that common knowledge is desirable. But when psychology is involved it is more often that we want to destroy common knowledge.
I was wandering by the Bottle Shop last week when I popped in on a whim to see if they had the Trimbach Fredric Emile. No luck in that search but I starting talking to Joe, one of the owners. I asked him if he carries wines distributed by Kermit Lynch. Not only did he carry them but Greg, the local Kermit-rep, was in the shop opening some of his wines for Joe and Amy, the other owner of the Bottle Shop. One thing led to another and I found that the Bottle Shop had both the Chateau Aney and Ch. de Bellevue recommended by the NYT wine writer Eric Asimov. I left clutching those two bottles and an invitation to a Saturday tasting at the shop hosted by Greg.
When I went by on Saturday, Greg was pouring a Domaine Henri Perrusset Macon-Villages. It was multi-faceted – classic Chardonnay but with a mineral almost salty finish. We bought several bottles and left converts to the Bottle Shop. They carry lots of wines hard to find elsewhere and the owners are friendly and informed.
The atmosphere of melancholia on the show Mad Men has to broken by brief bursts of bright comedy or an undercurrent of sexual intrigue. In this instance, the show indulged in the use of (at least) three strategic ploys to distract us from the plight of sad, newly divorced Don Draper regretting he boinked his secretary.
Draper’s ad agency SCDP is facing competition from a small entrant, say agency X (I forgot the name). SCDP has lost some accounts and is bidding for a new contract from Honda. Honda has put strict limits on the bid, stipulating that only a storyboard should be presented, not a filmed ad. SCDP cannot afford to produce a filmed ad and nor can agency X. Also, Don believes the Japanese might not appreciate the rules of their auction being broken. He comes up with a bluff: pretend to make a filmed ad and thereby trick agency X into making one. The Japanese will reject them and agency X will be driven close to bankruptcy. The ploy works not because of the clichéd Japanese cultural stereotype embraced by Don but because Honda is using its own strategic ploy: it gets a better deal from its existing agency by threatening to switch to the winner from the auction.
Two players bluffing and lying.
And then another player, Dr. Faye, reveals her bluff. She is not really married and is wearing a wedding ring to ward off unwanted male attention. She tells Don and he wonders why she told him. Faye smiles slightly. We know why she revealed her hand and we wonder why Don doesn’t get read it. Married-Winner-Don of Seasons 1 to 2 and perhaps even Season 3 would have worked it out immediately. But Single-Loser-Don of Season 4 is missing even blindingly obvious signals. I guess codes will be broken in a later show.
Locavores advocate paying attention to the distance your food traveled before it reached your table. They want you to be aware of the social cost of the the tomatoes you buy. Steven Landsburg ridicules this kind of micro-mindedness as follows:
You should. You should care about all those costs. And here are some other things you should care about: How many grapes were sacrificed by growing that California tomato in a place where there might have been a vineyard? How many morning commutes are increased, and by how much, because that New York greenhouse displaces a conveniently located housing development? What useful tasks could those California workers perform if they weren’t busy growing tomatoes? What about the New York workers? What alternative uses were there for the fertilizers and the farming equipment — or better yet, the resources that went into producing those fertilizers and farming equipment — in each location?
And he helpfully points out that accounting for all of this is unnecessary because these costs are already all summarized by the price of the tomato.
But even if markets are perfectly competitive, the marginal social cost of a tomato equals the price plus the under-priced cost of the environmental damage from the fuels used in transportation. Any given locavore has his own private belief about the size of that gap. So a locavore wants to know how much energy was used in order to calculate the total gap. And locavore advocates are doing precisely the right thing by presenting that information.
On the other hand, this guy, the guy who Landsburg was actually ridiculing, is spot on when he points out they often present distorted information.
I think all sides should compromise. We should build a very tiny mosque. And it should have wings. The Ground Zero Mosquito. But instead of sucking your blood it would enrich your blood with the dual nectars of Retribution and Tolerance. We will all make pilgrimages to the site and our children will line up to be kissed by it. And one by one they will announce their mosquito-induced blessings like “I want to vanquish all of those who do Evil to our homeland but still I Love them all the same.” Thank you Ground Zero Mosquito!
Mark Kleiman proposes making it legal to grow, share, and consume cannabis, but not to sell it.
To the consumer, developing a bad habit is bad news. To the marketing executive, it’s the whole point of the exercise. For any potentially addictive commodity or activity, the minority that gets stuck with a bad habit consumes the majority of the product. So the entire marketing effort is devoted to cultivating and maintaining the people whose use is a problem to them and a gold mine to the industry.
Take alcohol, for example. Divide the population into deciles by annual drinking volume. The top decile starts at four drinks a day, averaged year-round. That group consumes half of all the alcohol sold. The next decile does from two to four drinks a day. Those folks sop up the next thirty percent. Casual drinkers – people who have two drinks a day or less – take up only 20% of the total volume. The booze companies cannot afford to have their customers “drink in moderation.”
Some questions come to mind:
- Would it be legal to sell the seeds? If not, how could anybody get them? If so, has the problem (assuming there is one) really been solved?
- The economics of the problem boil down to which market structure minimizes the private incentive to boost demand, say via marketing. If we outlawed the sale of tobacco but allowed the sale of grow-your-own-tobacco kits would we see more or less marketing? The less competitive the market the more each individual seller gains from a boost in generic demand. Should we expect the market for growing kits to be more competitive than the market for the final product?
- If we are going to ban something, why not advertising? Seems more direct and arguably a Pareto improvement if advertising acts as rent-seeking between producers and creates “artificial” demand as the premise of the policy seems to be.
Subjects in an experiment were shown pictures of people of the opposite sex and were asked to rate their attractiveness. Some subjects were first subliminally flashed pictures of their opposite-sex parent. For other subjects the pictures they were rating were actually a composite image made from pictures of the subject himself. Both of these induced higher attractiveness ratings.
Finally, in a third treatment the subjects were falsely (!) told that the images they were seeing were partly morphed from pictures of themselves. This reduced the attractiveness ratings.
Here is a link to the paper.
I’m on a brief family trip to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. A couple of days ago, the temperatures were in the mid-90s F in the valley and in the 60s on the coast. To escape the heat, we made the obvious decision to visit the coast for the day. After the obligatory trip to the beach, I persuaded the troop to visit the Rogue Brewery and Pub in Newport. Rogue is a well-known producer of supposedly good beers. Somehow I had only sampled the Dead Guy Ale so I was eager to expand my horizons. The visit started well enough. You enter through a tall metal tower which looks like it’s been built from old beer storage vats. You can make howling noises and listen for the echo. A persuasive opening for two complaining children. Then, you walk through the brewery itself before you get to the pub – see the photo.
All the goodwill started disappearing when we got to the pub. The waitress couldn’t do justice to the 15 or so beers on tap and assumed we were already familiar with them. She wanted us to make decisions quickly and we had to slow her down. We settled for the samplers ($6 for four tastes) to get some idea of the beers on offer. Some of them were better than others. We enjoyed the Dry Hop Red and Yellow Snow IPA (ha ha). The Wheatbeer was weak, the Brutal IPA was not particularly brutal etc etc. You win some, you lose some so it was all forgivable. But what was unforgivable was the food. The clam chowder was O.K. but the rest was almost inedible. There’s lots of great seafood in Oregon and lots of great produce. With such great raw materials readily available, it’s criminal to put out food that could easily be English school lunch material. I’m definitely not coming here again and it’s put me off the beer.
On the way out, we sang a chorus: “The beer is O.K., the food – No!” People coming in looked amused. Hopefully they were visiting for the brewery tour and not for an early dinner.
First watch the video below. The dark haired guy, Booth, has just made a big bet. He is claiming to have three-of-a-kind (fours). If he does he would win the hand, but he might be bluffing. The other guy, Lingren, has to decide whether to call the bet and he does something unexpected: he asks Booth to show him one of his cards:
The strategic subtext is this: if Booth has the third four then he wants Lingren to call. If not, he wants him to fold. Implicitly, Lingren is offering the following mechanism: if you do have the third four then you won’t want me to know it because I would then fold. So show me a card, and if it’s not a four I will call you.
What is left unsaid is what Lingren would do if Booth declined to show a card. The spirit of the mechanism is that showing a card is the price Booth has to pay to have his bet called. So the suggestion is that Lingren would fold if Booth is not forthcoming because that would signal that he is hiding his strong hand.
But in fact this can’t be part of the deal because it would imply exactly the opposite of Lingren’s expectations. Booth, knowing that it would get Lingren to fold, would in fact hide his cards when he is bluffing and show a card when he actually has the three-or-a-kind (because then he gets a 50% chance of having his bet called rather than a 100% chance of Lingren folding.)
So what exactly should happen in this situation? And did Booth really play like a genius? Leave your analysis in the comments.
Visor visit: the ever-durable Presh Talwalker.
Here is the abstract from a paper by Matthew Pearson and Burkhard Schipper:
In an experiment using two-bidder first-price sealed bid auctions with symmetric independent private values, we collected information on the female participants’ menstrual cycles. We find that women bid significantly higher than men in their menstrual and premenstrual phase but do not bid significantly different in other phases of the menstrual cycle. We suggest an evolutionary hypothesis according to which women are genetically predisposed by hormones to generally behave more riskily during their fertile phase of their menstrual cycle in order to increase the probability of conception, quality of offspring, and genetic variety.
Believe it or not, this contributes to a growing literature.
Tyler links to this paper which asks the question “Do Minimum Parking Requirements Force Developers to Provide More Parking than Privately Optimal?” and answers in the affirmative.
I would think that is exactly the purpose of minimum parking requirements, especially in suburbs. Take as given that residents will resist the installation of parking meters on their streets or other parking restrictions. Then parking spaces in strip malls have positive externalities for homeowners because they reduce spillover parking in the neighborhoods. The privately optimal number of parking spaces is therefore too low and mandatory minimums are aimed at correcting that. The question we are interested in is whether mandatory minimums increase parking space beyond what is socially optimal.
Mastercard inControl allows a credit card user to set up a monthly budget so charges are rejected once the user’s expenditures per month reach the budget. Useless for the fully rational consumer and a godsend for the accidentally-profligate and the constantly-tempted shopper.
Citibank is set to introduce this product in the U.S. in partnership with Mastercard, Visa and Amex do not have similar products. The Mastercard network and Citi are in a great position to capture consumers from their competitors. The segment that is creditworthy and lives beyond its means is the most profitable for the credit card companies. It is precisely this segment that will value the inControl feature to limit their consumption. They may be willing to pay for the feature and there is also the possibility that they will spend a lot on their cards so there are plenty of fees to be collected from merchants who accept the cards.
Sounds good for credit card companies. But what’s good for one firm is not good for the industry. If Citi/MC capture consumers from competitors, the competitors will adopt similar practices and adopt the same technology to retain existing user or entice new adopters. Just the sort of competition that is good for consumers and bad for firms.
Perhaps new consumers will get credit cards because of the inControl feature. There must be some consumers who do not even have a credit card as they are have gone overboard using them in the past. If they get one, the additional purchases will generate more merchant fees.
Isn’t that good for the credit card companies? Even that is not clear. More purchases will generate more merchant fees. The fess are set by Mastercard and Visa and accrue mainly to them. The banks may not see much of this additional revenue.
All in all inControl will be good for the networks but bad for banks who will lose the interest fees they generate from outofControl credit card user. The mystery is why MC or Visa did not introduce a similar product earlier. There are good reasons for banks to oppose them….maybe that’s why?
This guy thinks so.
There it is: Zynga’s dirty technique for making its $500 million. It ropes players into the game with the promise that absolutely anyone can play. It will even float you coins the first time you run out, not unlike the casino that gives a high-roller luxury accommodations in anticipation of making back the house’s stake. It dangles the prospect of a bigger, prettier, better farm; as the game loads, you’re faced with idyllic images of well-off farms, not unlike the glossy ads for high-end residences. But it’s nearly impossible to get some of those goods without ponying up a buck or two here and there. When Zynga’s got a user base of 61 million digital farmers, it’s easy enough to make ends meet, to say the least.
The argument seems to be: it sucks your time, it gets your friends hooked too, it’s stupid. Like TV, reading blogs, talking on the phone, etc. I do recommend reading the article though because its a fine case study in how to try and substitute a logical argument in place of “Why do people have tastes that are so different from mine?” (Full disclosure: some people very close to me play Zynga games. I think Zynga games are really stupid.)
Ten Gallon Greeting: GeekPress.
Even as parking meter technology improves to handle credit cards and flexible pricing, one relic remains: pay-in-advance. You have to commit to a period of time and pay the meter at the beginning of that time interval. You are fined if you don’t move before your pre-specified time expires.
Wouldn’t it be better if you paid only at the end and only for the amount of time you actually occupied the parking space? This is easily implemented in smart parking meters: you swipe your card when you park and you swipe it again when to pay when you are done. To prevent scofflaws, if you never swipe the second time the rest of the day’s parking is on you (sorta like the lost ticket fee in parking lots), and if you are parked in a meter that wasn’t swiped the first time you get a ticket.
Holding fixed the meter rate and demand for parking such a switch would lower your total parking bill and hence revenues. To show this you could try writing down a model where the parker has a probability distribution over waiting times and chooses optimally his parking time, but there is a simpler argument. With pay-in-advance two things can happen: either you pay for more time than you actually use or you get a ticket and pay a fine!
But switching to pay-as-you-leave parking must surely increase overall demand for parking and may even increase individual parking spells so the net effect on revenue is not so clear.
While we are on the subject I liked Tyler Cowen’s bit about free parking. But I think that there is a second-best logic that justifies mandatory free parking in the suburbs. Homeowners want their streets free of cars (but still the option to park on the street when necessary) and they don’t want parking meters on their sidewalks. This makes strip-mall parking a public good. The private incentive of commercial developers is to provide too little parking.
1. What will Israel do if Iran gets close to going nuclear? Interesting article by Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic.
2. What does the future hold for your lying toddler?
3. What do Buzz Aldrin and Leon Panetta have in common?
4. Brookline-Palestine beer connection.
1. Kenneth Arrow on healthcare and climate change.
2. Thomas Schelling on climate change.
- There is diversity in sexual preference (same-sex or opposite-sex) but most people are at corner solutions.
- The ideal temperature in San Diego is 66F. You will worry in the morning when its cloudy but once the marine layer burns off the sun by itself will keep you warm. The air will keep you cool.
- It is not possible to define ‘fitness’ in a way that doesn’t make “survival of the fittest” into a tautology.
- People who argue that tenure should disappear should begin by saying what they think the market failure is that prevents that from happening by itself.
Jeff discussed a seminal game theoretic analysis of Cheap Talk in an earlier post: ”Strategic Information Transmission” by Crawford and Sobel studies a decision-maker, the Receiver, who listens to a message from an informed advisor, the Sender, before making a decision. The optimal decision for each player depends on the information held by the Sender. If the Sender and Receiver have the same preferences over the best decision, there is an equilibrium where the Sender reports his information truthfully and the Receiver makes the best possible decision.
What if the Sender is biased and wants a different decision, say a bit to the left of the Receiver’s optimal decision? Then the Sender has an incentive to lie and move the Receiver to the left and always telling the truth is no longer an equilibrium. Crawford and Sobel show that this implies that in equilibrium information can only be conveyed in lumpy chunks and the Receiver takes the best expected decision for each chunk. The bigger the bias, the less information can be transmitted in equilibrium and the larger each lump must be.
The Crawford-Sobel model has differences of opinion generated by differences in preferences. But individuals who have the same preferences but different beliefs also have differences of opinion. The Sender and Receiver may agree that if global warming is occurring drastic action should be taken to slow it down. But the Sender may believe it is occurring while the Receiver believes it is not. Differences in beliefs seem to create a similar bias to differences in preferences and hence one might conjecture there is little difference between them. A lovely paper by Che and Kartik shows this is not the case. If the Sender with a belief-based bias acquires information, his belief changes. If signals are informative, his beliefs must move closer to the truth and his bias must go down. If Sender with a preference-based bias acquires information, his bias by definition does not change. So, when there are belief-based differences in opinion, information acquisition changes the bias, indeed it reduces it. This allows the Sender to transmit more information in equilibrium and improve the Receiver’s decision implementation (this is the Crawford-Sobel intuition but in a different model). The Sender values this influence and has good incentives to acquire information. Hiring an advisor with a different belief is valuable for the decision-maker, better than having a Yes-Man. Some pretty cool and fun insights. And it is always nice when the intuition is well explained and it is related to classical work
There is lots of other subtle stuff and I am not doing justice to the paper. You can find the paper Opinions as Incentives on Navin’s webpage.
Here is a theory of why placebos work. I don’t claim that it is original, it seems natural enough that I am surely not the first to suggest it. But I don’t think I have heard it before.
Getting better requires an investment by the body, by the immune system say. The investment is costly: it diverts resources in the body, and it is risky: it can succeed or fail. But the investment is complementary with externally induced conditions, i.e. medicine. Meaning that the probability of success is higher when the medicine is present.
Now the body has evolved to have a sense of when the risk is worth the cost, and only then does it undertake the investment. Being sick means either that the investment was tried and it failed or that the body decided it wasn’t worth taking the risk (yet! the body has evolved to understand option value.)
Giving a placebo tricks the body into thinking that conditions have changed such that the investment is now worth it. This is of course bad in that conditions have not changed and the body is tricked into taking an unfavorable gamble. Still, the gamble succeeds with positive probability (just too low a probability for it to be profitable on average) and in that case the patient gets better due to the placebo effect.
The empirical implication is that patients who receive placebos do get better with positive probability, but they also get worse with positive probability and they are worse off on average than patients who received no treatment at all (didn’t see any doctor, weren’t part of the study.) I don’t know if these types of controls are present in typical trials.
I liked this post from Dan Reeves.
Remember, if it’s in the news don’t worry about it. The very definition of news is “something that almost never happens.” When something is so common that it’s no longer news — car crashes, domestic violence — that’s when you should worry about it.
The truth of that[1] hit home recently when I saw a news feature on the abduction of a four-year-old girl from her front yard in Missouri. Candlelight vigils, nation-wide amber alert, police blockades where every single car was stopped and questioned, FBI agents swarming the house. I think the expected reaction from parents is “oh my god, I need to be so vigilant, even in my own front yard!” My reaction was the opposite: Wow, this sort of thing really does essentially never happen. Let the kids run free!
While I generally have similar reactions, it is easy to take this too far. The weather is the prime counter-example. Valuable minutes of every nightly newscast in Southern California are devoted to repeating the same weather-mantra “Late Night and Early Morning Low Clouds and Fog” which indeed happens every single day.
Also, your interpretation of news depends on your implicit model of competition between news sources. A perfectly plausible model would be consistent with abductions happening every day but being reported only once in a while because we have a taste for variety in our stories of tragedy.
In a recent episode of Top Chef, the remaining contestants were split into two groups, say A and B. Group A had to vote for the best and worst dishes in Group B and vice-versa. One the two contestants with the worst dishes gets eliminated by the usual judges, i.e.not the contestants.
All the contestants cooked in the same kitchen so they could match each dish to each chef (and, in any case, each chef introduced his own dish). So, each voter knows which chef’s chances of surviving she is affecting by voting for or against his dish. In the next episode, each voter – if they survive till the next round – competes with the remaining chefs. So, other things being equal, the optimal strategy is simple: each voter should vote for the weakest candidate in the other group and against the strongest candidate. There have been enough episodes for everyone to pretty much agree on who the best and worst cooks are in each group. The “rational choice” calculation: you want to maximize the chances of winning so you want to be matched up against the worst chefs in future rounds and get rid of the best chefs if possible.
One caveat is that in future rounds, contestants will be judged by the usual crew of Tom, Padma etc so you might care about your reputation with them. But the evidence from past series strongly suggests that they do not vote against “strategic” contestants. Food is important and, for the producers, drama. Strategic behavior might actually help you survive longer if you create drama.
This “rational choice” prediction had at most a 50% success rate. One group did choose one of the strongest contestants, Kenny, from the other group for the worst dish. And he did claim that he’d been put on the chopping block to eliminate a future threat. But the strongest guy in the other group, Angelo, did not get close to elimination. And maybe Kenny did have the worst dish.
It’s interesting to speculate on why the obvious rational choice prediction is not borne out. Perhaps people are honest or it is very hard to lie about a dish when its obviously good – the verifiable information makes it difficult to dissemble. It’s also hard to be disliked. The contestants all live in the same house. In some episodes they cook together and have to coöperate. Everyone cam remember the hated Marcel from an earlier season! Voting is sequential which exasperates the problem – the first person to vote does not want to come out as an evil strategic player and the later people to vote know they can’t impact the outcome anyway. So, perhaps reputation among the contestants themselves is important.
If they use the same Cold War conceit next season, I would love to have anonymous voting. Behind the veil of ambiguity, people might be more strategic. It would add to the drama – the following week’s episode will be full of intrigue if a good chef gets knifed (figuratively!) in the back.
In San Francisco no less
San Francisco has been working on making parking “smarter” for quite a while now, and it’s just recently taken another big step in that direction by starting to replace over 5,000 older parking meters with the snazzy new model pictured above. Those will not only let you pay with a credit or debit card (and soon a special SFMTA card), but automatically adjust parking rates based on supply and demand, which means you could pay anywhere from $0.25 to $6.00 an hour depending on how many free spaces there are. Those rates are determined with the aid of some sensors that keep a constant watch on parking spaces, which also means you’ll be able to check for free spaces in an area on your phone or your computer before you even leave the house.
fedora flip: rob jefferson.
Limbaugh quotes from a Times article about the paper (gated link) and critiques it:
“Using survey data, it finds that high unemployment rates are associated with less concern for the environment and greater skepticism about global warming.” I don’t think unemployment has nothing to do with it. It has to do with the fact that we have now learned that man-made global warming is a hoax that has been perpetrated by a bunch of leftists, and the guys participating in it at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research at the University of East Anglia have been found out. And even though the partisan political operative media has yet to report on this, we have — and more and more people are understanding now what a fraud this whole thing has been, like much of liberalism is. “The Chilling Effect of Recession.”
He adds:
Despite all their efforts over the last 20 to 30 years to make you feel guilty for causing all this destruction, now we have a recession that’s come along and, damn it, you are being so selfish that you’ve given up the notion that you have to save the planet. Now you want a job instead, and these ruling class professors are distressed. By the way, as we have previously noted on this program, Google searches themselves cause global warming. “From national surveys…” This is from the abstract: “From national surveys, we find that an increase in a state’s unemployment rate is associated with a decrease in the probability that residents think global warming is happening and reduced support for the US to target policies intended to mitigate global warming. Finally, in California, we find that an increase in a county’s unemployment rate is associated with a significant decrease in county residents choosing the environment as the most important policy issue.”
So now you, you selfish people, are so concerned about finding a job while you’re unemployed that you are forgetting about global warming. You are forgetting about environmentalism. “From the study’s abstract: ‘[W]e find that an increase in a state’s unemployment rate decreases Google searches for “global warming” and increases searches for “unemployment,” and that the effect differs according to a state’s political ideology.’” So this scientific survey is using Google searches for their data? This is hilarious. This is actually from the study by these two university professors: “We find that an increase in a state’s unemployment rate decreases Google searches for ‘global warming’…” They’re actually judging public interest in global warming by examining Google searches, and they’re ticked off more of you people are entering the search term “unemployment” than you are “global warming.”
Limbaugh grudgingly/sarcastically admits:
I am not making this up. These are learned, high-education, ruling class members — the best and the brightest, the smartest — and they’re out there researching why it is that you don’t care about global warming.
We are all used to such reports, delivered behind the veil of anonymity furnished by peer-reviewed journals. But to have infamy delivered in public and by Rush Limbaugh. Surely, a mark of honor.
Hertz made a merger offer to Dollar, an offer that made it difficult for Dollar to approach another suitor. But Dollar is trying to wriggle out of its chastity belt and flirt with Avis. Each marriage carries the risk that the Feds step in before the relationship is fully consummated. After all the merged firms might have the market power to hike up prices. A preliminary analysis suggests given the current segmentation of the rental market into leisure and premium classes, antitrust issues are less of a threat to merger to Hertz than for Avis:
“The rental car market is segmented into two categories: premium and travel/leisure. Hertz and Avis classify themselves as premium car rental companies renting to travelers on business and those who otherwise are less sensitive to price and more attuned to service and car quality. Both companies also operate in the leisure market. Budget is Avis’s leisure market subsidiary, while Hertz has its Advantage leisure subsidiary. Hertz has offered to divest itself of this subsidiary as part of this transaction and in response to any antitrust objections.
Dollar Thrifty classifies itself as travel/leisure.
At first blush, this would appear to give Hertz a free pass, as the company does not define itself as being in Dollar Thrifty’s market segment and the Advantage subsidiary is quite small.”
But even in this scenario, market power issues arise. In the existing market structure, Dollar sets its prices ignoring the impact they have on Hertz and Avis profits and focussing on just its own profits. In particular, Dollar captures some premium customers from Hertz and Avis if its prices are sufficiently low. This kid of cutthroat competition is the essence of capitalism and is to be lauded.
But of there is a Dollar-Hertz merger say, the competition from the leisure car rental division cannibalizes the profits of the premium car division. There is less of an incentive for Dollar-Hertz to cut prices and leisure rental from the firm will become more expensive. Now, Avis can raise the price of Budget cars. This will allow Dollar-Hertz to raise leisure car prices more and a lovely – for firms! – spiral of rising prices will ensure. And this is without any collusion between the firms- the basic forces of competition are dampened by the merger.
How big is this effect? It’s going to depend on substitution effects between premium and leisure segments. All my colleagues who do empirical I.O. will be gainfully employed and I hope I will be drinking good wine at their houses (yes, they will each have multiple houses).
