You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘friends’ tag.
You poor sap. I know you won’t believe any of this, but you should. How can I get it through your thick, acne-pocked skull? All the stupid things you are so worried about really aren’t very important at all. In fact, they are the opposite of important. What if I told you that all the “winners” around you right now were actually the losers? Well, I just did tell you that, but you still don’t believe me because I’m an adult and 16 year olds can never trust adults.
What if I tried to explain it this way: That feeling you’ve never been able to put a name on — it feels something like, let’s say, a bone-crushing insecurity and cluelessness about your place in the world — just forget about it! That’s right. You can forget about it and go about your days — confident with the knowledge that it’s all going to work out just fine.
Could it be that this kind of confidence would just turn his 16 year old self into one of the winners who will eventually turn out to be a loser? Isn’t that kind of confidence exactly what separates the winners in high school from the losers? And what else but insecurity and cluelessness about your place in the world leads a 16 year old to give up on the present and try to explore ways of being that might one day give him real self-confidence and not just the artificially, socially propped-up kind?
Drawing: Follow Your Heart from www.f1me.net
I have known Larry since the time I was on the junior job market and he was winding down a spectacular term as chairman of the BU economics department, having built a top-ten department out of nothing. Eight years later I spent a year as a faculty member at BU and again Larry was chairman. Everybody who has spent any time with Larry in a professional capacity agrees that he is a natural-born leader. He just has this quality that draws people from all sides to his. And he knows how to make an organization work. On top of all that he is great economist with world-leading expertise on the topics that would be most important for a President right now to know. I honestly can’t think of anybody I know personally who would make a better President than Larry. I might even vote for him.
Here’s his campaign web page. Via Tyler Cowen on Twitter.
Someone you know is making a scene on a plane. They don’t see you. Yet. As of now they think they are making a scene only in front of total strangers who they will never see again. It might be awkward if they knew you were a witness. Should you avert your eyes in hopes they won’t see you seeing them?
If they are really making a scene it is highly unlikely that you didn’t notice. So if eventually he does see you and sees that you are looking the other way he is still going to know that you saw him. So in fact it’s not really possible to pretend.
Moreover if he sees that you were trying to pretend then he will infer that you think that he was behaving inappropriately and that is why you averted your eyes. Given that he’s going to know you saw him you’d rather him think that you think that he was in fact in the right. Then there will be no awkwardness afterward.
However, there is the flip side to consider. If you do make eye contact there will be higher order knowledge that you saw him. How he feels about that depends on whether he thinks his behavior is inappropriate. If he does then he’s going to assume you do too. Once you realize you can’t avoid leaving the impression that you knew he was behaving inappropriately, and the unavoidable mutual knowledge of that fact, the best you can do is avoid the higher-order knowledge by looking the other way.
So it all boils down to a simple rule of thumb: If you think that he knows he is behaving inappropriately then you should look away. You are going to create discomfort either way, but less if you minimize the higher-orders of knowledge. But if you think that he thinks that in fact he has good reason to be making a scene then, even if you know better and see that he is actually way out of line, you must make eye contact to avoid him inferring that you are being judgmental.
Unless you can’t fake it. But whatever you do, don’t blog about it.
When you shop for a gift, your recipient observes only what you bought, and not what alternatives you considered.
Why would price matter more to givers than receivers? Dr. Flynn and his Stanford colleague, Gabrielle Adams, attribute it to the “egocentric bias” of givers who focus on their own experience in shopping. When they economize by giving a book, they compare it with the bracelet that they passed up.
But the recipients have a different frame of reference. They don’t know anything about the bracelet, so they’re not using it for comparison. The salient alternative in their minds may be the possibility of no gift at all, in which case the book looks wonderfully thoughtful.
Click through for an excellent article on giving, touching on the potlatch, the gift registry, and re-gifting.
You and your partner have to decide on a new venture. Maybe you and your sweetie are deciding on a movie, you and your co-author are deciding on which new idea to develop, or you and your colleague are deciding which new Assistant Professor to hire.
Deliberation consists of proposals and reactions. When you pitch your idea you naturally become attached to it. Its your idea, your creation. Your feelings are going to be hurt if your partner doesn’t like it.
Maybe you really are a dispassionate common interest maximizer, but there’s no way for your partner to know that for sure. You try to say “give me your honest opinion, I promise I have thick skin, you won’t hurt my feelings.” But you would say that even if it’s a little white lie.
The important thing is that no matter how sensitive you actually are, your partner believes that there is a chance your feelings will be hurt if she shoots down your idea. And she might even worry that you would respond by feeling resentful towards her. All of this makes her reluctant to give her honest opinion about your idea. The net result is that some inferior projects might get adopted because concern for hurt feelings gets in the way of honest information exchange.
Unless you design the mechanism to work around that friction. The basic problem is that when you pitch your idea it becomes common knowledge that you are attached to it. From that moment forward it is common knowledge that any opinion expressed about the idea has the chance of causing hurt feelings.
So a better mechanism would change the timing to remove that feature. You and your partner first announce to one another which options are unacceptable to you. Now all of the rejections have been made before knowing which ones you are attached to. Only then do you choose your proposal from the acceptable set.
If your favorite idea has been rejected then for sure you are disappointed. But your feelings are not hurt because it is common knowledge that her rejection is completely independent of your attachment. And for exactly that reason she is perfectly comfortable being honest about which options are unacceptable.
This is going to work better for movies, and new Assistant Professors than it is for research ideas. Because we know in advance the universe of all movies and job market candidates.
Research ideas and other creative ventures are different because there is no way to enumerate all of the possibilities beforehand and reject the unacceptable ones. Indeed the real value of a collaborative relationship is that the partners are bringing to the table brand new previously unconceived-of ideas. This makes for a far more delicate relationship.
We can thus classify relationships according to whether they are movie-like or idea-like, and we would expect that the first category are easier to sustain with second-best mechanisms whereas the second require real trust and honesty.
(inspired by a conversation with +Emil Temnyalov and Jorge Lemus)
If you have a meeting scheduled at 2 and you are worried its going to drag on too long, what do you do? Here’s a confession: Sometimes I lie and say I have an appointment and I have to leave at 3. But it’s a double-edged sword.
Because warning my friend that I will have to leave at 3 implies that I anticipate that the hour will be a binding constraint. That would only be true if I expect the meeting to go that long. My friend will therefore infer that the topic of our meeting is important enough to me to potentially warrant an hour of face time.
As far as I know, had I never said anything he might have kept the meeting to 30 minutes, but now that I capped it at 3:00, its a sure thing we are going to meet for the full hour.
The problem is that there is no way I can know how long he was planning to meet. If i knew he was planning to leave at 2:30 I wouldn’t say anything. But if he is actually planning to stay until 4:30 and I don’t invent a 3:00 appointment I am hosed.
Of course some meetings really need to take more than 30 minutes and often you only discover that in the course of the meeting. The downside of the cap is that it commits you. Unless you want to lose all credibility you are going to have to keep to your fictional meeting and cut those meetings shorter than they should be.
So what is the optimal cap? The tradeoffs are reminiscent of textbook monopoly pricing. You have your marginal and infra-marginal meetings. If i raise the cap by a minute then the marginal meeting gets the extra minute that it really needs but the infra-marginal meeting gets needlessly extended.
Its a complicated calculation that comes down to hazard rates, incentive constraints, etc. but I will save you the effort; I have done the integration by parts. The optimal cap is exactly 37 minutes. You can’t say that of course because your friend will know that nobody schedules appointments at 2:37, so you will have to round up or down to the half hour.
Or schedule all your meetings to start at 23 minutes past the hour.
Measuring social influence is notoriously difficult in observational data. If I like Tin Hat Trio and so do my friends is it because I influenced them or we just have similar tastes, as friends often do. A controlled experiment is called for. It’s hard to figure out how to do that. How can an experimenter cause a subject to like something new and then study the effect on his friends?
Online social networks open up new possibilities. And here is the first experiment I came across that uses Facebook to study social influence, by Johan Egebark and Mathias Ekstrom. If one of your friends “likes” an item on Facebook, will it make you like it too?
Making use of five Swedish users’ actual accounts, we create 44 updates in total during a seven month period.1 For every new update, we randomly assign our user’s friends into either a treatment or a control group; hence, while both groups are exposed to identical status updates, treated individuals see the update after someone (controlled by us) has Liked it whereas individuals in the control group see it without anyone doing so. We separate between three different treatment conditions: (i) one unknown user Likes the update, (ii) three unknown users Like the update and (iii) one peer Likes the update. Our motivation for altering treatments is that it enables us to study whether the number of previous opinions as well as social proximity matters.2 The result from this exercise is striking: whereas the first treatment condition left subjects unaffected, both the second and the third more than doubled the probability of Liking an update, and these effects are statistically significant.
Assume that people like to have access to a community of people with similar habits, tastes, demographics, etc. A “community” is just a group of some minimal absolute size. Then the denser the population the more likely you will find enough people to form such a community.
But this effect is larger for people whose tastes, habits, and demographics are more idisyncratic than for people in the majority. Garden-variety people will find a community of garden-variety people just about anywhere they go. By contrast, if types of people are randomly distributed across locations, the density of cities makes it more likely that a community can be assembled there.
But that means that types won’t be just randomly distributed across locations. The unique types are willing to pay more to live in cities than the garden-variety types.
You receive an email with a question asking for advice or a suggestion or an opinion. To give a full answer you would have to take some time to think. You are a little busy and you would rather not give it too much thought but there is a second consideration that leads you to give the quick and dirty answer right away. The longer you wait the longer they will know you thought about it and the more credence they will give your answer. Not to mention that more of your reputation will be at stake if you are assumed to have thought carefully.
Still, some issues are important enough to give thought to. But how much? The same tradeoff is there, but now the characteristics of the correspondent matter. Every additional second you spend thinking allows you to make a slightly more thoughtful answer but also increases what he expects of you. If he is very sharp, he will be read your reply and possibly see deeper into the question than you did making you look bad. The gap only gets bigger the longer you wait. If he is less sharp, every second tilts the balance in your favor.
All of this is predicated on him knowing just how much time you spent on the question. You want to manipulate this by establishing a reputation for rapid-fire responses. Then if you wait a day but still give a lousy answer, he will put it down to you just having been busy for day before giving your usual top-of-your-head reply. Indeed you want everyone to think you are busier than you are.
Then along comes instant messaging, facebook, etc speeding up communications. You are expected to have seen the message sooner so its harder to pretend you were unavoidably delayed. On the plus side though now you can more easily commit to being busy. Just friend everyone. Your feed is so cluttered up with babble that these really important questions credibly get lost in the shuffle. He can directly see how overloaded you are.
So the value of your marginal friend is equal to the incremental publicly observed distraction she creates.
Amazon has patented a way to let you return gifts before you even receive them.
Amazon’s innovation, not ready for this Christmas season, includes an option to “Convert all gifts from Aunt Mildred,” the patent says. “For example, the user may specify such a rule because the user believes that this potential sender has different tastes than the user.” In other words, the consumer could keep an online list of lousy gift-givers whose choices would be vetted before anything ships.
The benefit to the receiver is clear. The benefit to Amazon is even bigger:
The proposal has also brought into focus a very costly part of the e-retailing business model: Up to 30 percent of purchases are returned, and the cost of getting rejected gifts back across the country and onto shelves has online retailers scrambling for ways to reduce these expenses.
To the giver? Think of it as weakly dominating a gift card. It’s a gift card with a default. If gifts are better that gift cards because they allow you to show the recipient something they never would have found/considered on their own, then this system achieves that without the risk of it going badly. Perhaps that allows you to take even more risks with your gifts. Not everyone is happy though.
“This idea totally misses the spirit of gift giving,” Post said. “The point of gift giving is to allow someone else to go through that action of buying something for us. Otherwise, giving a gift just becomes another one of the world’s transactions.”
Amazon’s system gives users a “Gift Conversion Wizard” through which they can program various rules like “no gifts made of wool” or ”Convert any gift from Aunt Mildred to a gift certificate, but only after checking with me.” But what will the giver be told?
Most cleverly – or deviously, depending on your attitude toward this sort of manipulation – the gift giver will be none the wiser: “The user may also be provided with the option of sending a thank you note for the original gift,” according to the patent, “even though the original gift is converted.” (Alternatively, a recipient could choose to let the giver know he has exchanged the item for something else.)
Casquette cast: Courtney Conklin Knapp.
Facebook, Buzz, Reader, and other social networking sites all have one thing in common: if you like something then you get to like it. But you never get to dislike what you dislike. (Sure you can unlike what you previously liked, but just as with that other interest rate you are constrained by the zero lower bound. You can’t go negative.)
This kind of system seems to pander to people such as me who obsessively count likes (and twitter followers, and google reader subscribers and…) because for people like us even a single dislike would be devastating. With only positive feedback possible we are spared the bad news.
But after a while we start to get the nagging suspicion that the lack of a like is tantamount to being disliked. We put ourselves in the mind of each individual reader. If she liked it then she will like it. If she didn’t like it, she would like to dislike it but she can’t. So she’s silent. But then if she was neutral she now knows that by being silent she is going to be pooled with with the dislike haters. She doesn’t want to hurt my feelings so she likes. Kindhearted but cruel: now I know that everyone who didn’t like indeed didn’t like. It’s exactly as if there was a dislike button. Despair.
But wait. One wrinkle saves our fragile ego. Some people are just too busy to like. Or they don’t know about the like button. And who knows exactly how many people read the article anyway. So a non-like could be any one of these. Which means that kindhearted neutrals can safely stay on the sidelines and pool with these non-participants. A pool big enough to drown out the haters. Joyful noise! And as a bonus I get to know for sure that the likers are likers and not just patronizers.
Finally there’s the personal aspect, it’s flattering to see who likes. The serial likers keep me going. Especially this one regular reader who by amazing coincidence has the same name as me and who likes everything I write.
(drawing: emotional baggage from www.f1me.net)
Throw a party. And use a system like evite.com to handle the invitations. There is a typical pattern to the responses over time. You will have an initial flurry of yeses and regrets followed by a long period of silence punctuated by sporadic responses which continues to the days before the party. Then there is a final flurry and that is when you learn if your friends are real friends.
Because people come to your party for one of two reasons. Either they like you or they just feel obligated for reasons like you are an important co-worker or they don’t want to hurt your feelings, etc. Think of how these two types of people will handle your invitation.
An invitation is an option that can be exercised at any time before the date of the party. The people who did not respond immediately are waiting to decide whether to exercise the option. If she’s a true friend then this is because she has a potential conflict that would prevent her attending. She is waiting and hoping to avoid that conflict. When she is sure there is no conflict she will say yes.
The other people are hoping for an excuse not to come. Once they get a better offer, manage to schedule a conflicting business trip, or otherwise commit themselves, they will send their regrets.
In both cases, when the party is imminent, the option value of waiting is gone. Those who want to come but haven’t gotten out of their conflict give up and send their regrets. Those who hoped to get out of it but failed to come up with a believable excuse give up and accept.
So, a simple measure of how much your friends like you is the proportion of acceptances that arrive in the final days. Lots of acceptances means you better set aside a few extra drinks for yourself.
Because communication requires both a talker and a listener and it takes time and energy for the listener to process information. So it may be cheap to talk but it is costly to listen.
But then the cost of listening implies that there is an opportunity cost to everything you say. Because you can only say so much and still be listened to. They won’t drink from a firehose.
When you want to be listened to you have an incentive to ration what you say, and therefore the mere fact that you chose to say something conveys information about how valuable it was to you to have it heard. There is no babbling because babbling isn’t worth it.
I also believe that this is a key friction determining the architecture of social networks. Who talks and who listens to whom? The efficient structure economizes on the cost of listening. It is efficient to have a small number of people who specialize in listening to many sources then selectively “curating” and rebroadcasting specialized content. End-listeners are spared the cost of filtering. The economic question is whether the private and social incentives are aligned for someone who must ration his output in order to attract listeners.
A guy sometimes says stuff that, for reasons completely mysterious to him, hurts a girl’s feelings. It comes out that she’s hurt and he desperately tries to explain. He didn’t mean it. He didn’t think she would interpret it that way. He was just talking. She’s taking it too personally.
He forgets to call, he misses important dates, he get stalled by unexpected commitments. She listens to all of his excuses.
He’s trying to convince her that he had the right intentions. You see, he thinks that relationships are all about moral hazard. He wants her to know that he’s trying hard, but mistakes get made.
And he can never figure out why this isn’t enough for her. But the reason is simple. For her, relationships are all about adverse selection. It’s not his actions per se, it’s what they reveal about his type. She’s perfectly willing to forgive his missteps, she believes him that he’s trying hard and that he didn’t know he was being a louse, but that’s precisely the problem. If he weren’t such a lemon he would know the right way to say things, she’d always be in his thoughts, and she’d always be his highest priority.
If you receive email from ‘me’ and every instance of the word “me” is single-quoted, as in ‘me,’ don’t bother looking for any hidden message.
Rather it is a strange bug in my iPhone text-substitution mechanism which replaces every instance of me with ‘me.’ I could probably figure out how to fix this, but I might not. Sometimes feel like I am encased in single quotes so it seems appropriate.
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.
How often do you and your friends agree?
According to recent work by Winter Mason, Duncan Watts, and myself [Sharad Goel], you probably don’t know them as well as you think. In particular, we found that when friends disagree on a political issue, they are unaware of that disagreement about 60% of the time. Even close friends who discuss politics are typically unaware of their differences in opinions.
You probably can guess my reaction. (Or at least you think you can.) Since I am always right, and my friends are right more often than they are wrong, I am right to assume that they agree with me more often than not.
It turns out that my distant friends are right just about as often as my close friends:
people consistently overestimate the likelihood that their friends agree with them on political issues. Notably, even though close friends (so-called strong ties[1]) are in reality more likely to agree with one another than distant friends, people do not appropriately adjust their perceptions. In other words, though we think close and distant friends are about equally likely to agree with us on political issues, in reality we are much more likely to agree with close friends.
I am very interested in this kind of survey work because I think that people do overestimate how similar they are to the rest of the world and I think it has important consequences. But perhaps for different reasons than these authors are emphasizing.
At the margin people are too reluctant to express themselves because they assume that what they have to say is obvious. But in fact the obvious thing is exactly what you want to say. Because the more obvious the thought the more likely it is uniquely yours and the more valuable it is to others.
Ryan Avent’s self-styled populist post takes to task a rich man’s tax-conscious balance sheet dance:
As far as I can tell, this is entirely within the law. But I don’t think it’s improper to declare it obscene. Shameful, even. With a fortune of that size, additional wealth is about little more than score-keeping.
Everyone has this natural response to a rich person desiring to avoid taxes. We all think like Ryan does:
But let’s be honest for a moment. According to this Bloomberg story, Mr Lampert is worth $3 billion. If he earns just 1% per year on that fortune—and he certainly earns much more—then he takes home $30 million in income. Per year. That’s 600 times the median household income in America. It’s more money than a person can reasonably spend. With that much money you can binge every day, and yet the money will just keep accumulating.
But you don’t have to think much longer than that to see a different side of things. Since Mr. Rich is beyond the binge-every-day constraint, there are lots of other things he can do with his money besides bingeing. For example, if you were Mr. Rich you could probably think of a lot of loved ones you would like to make happy by sharing your wealth with them. Or perhaps you understand that money is what determines what gets done in the world and maybe you have very strong feelings about what should get done.
Like maybe you want to be able to donate to artists or schools or libraries. Maybe you want to help prevent HIV infection. Is it so obvious that a rich man, already beyond bingeing, who wants an extra dollar is being more greedy than a middle-class man who wants to get a dollar closer to the bingeing stage?
Let me be clear that I don’t believe that all of the Mr. Riches are trying to be Bill and Melinda Gates. But I don’t see how you can conclude just from the fact that someone is rich that they don’t have reasons that we would be completely sympathetic to if we knew them.
And if I were a smart do-gooder who thought that everyone on Wall Street was evil the obvious thing to do would be to start a hedge fund, rip them off, and spend their money to meet my goals.
Ghutrah greeting: gappy3000.
“If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” That is usually bad advice. Because then when you say nothing at all it is understood that you have only unkind things to say.
If you are trying to maximize pleasantry then your policy should depend on your listener’s preferences. Based on what you say she is going to revise her beliefs over what you think about her. What matters is her preferences over these beliefs.
A key fact is that you have only limited control over those beliefs. Some of the time you will say something kind and some of the time you will say something unkind. These will move her beliefs up and down but by the law of total probability the average value of her beliefs is equal to her prior. You control only the variance.
If good feelings help at the margin more than bad feelings hurt then she is effectively risk-loving. You should go to extremes and maximize variance. Here the old adage applies: you should say something nice when you have something nice to say and you should not say anything nice when you don’t. In terms of her beliefs, it makes no difference whether you say the unkind thing or just keep quiet and allow her to infer it. But perhaps politeness gets a lexicographic kick here and you should not say anything at all.
(On thing the standard policy ignores is the ambiguity. Since there are potentially many unkind things you might be witholding, if she is pessimistic you might worry that she will assume the worst. Then you should consider saying slightly-unkind things in order to prevent the pessimistic inference. Still there is the danger of unraveling because then when you say nothing at all she will know that what is on your mind is even worse than that.)
If she is risk-averse in beliefs then you want to go to the opposite extreme and never say anything. She never updates her beliefs.
But prospect theory suggests that her preferences are S-shaped around the prior: risk-averse on the upside but risk-loving on the downside. Then often it is optimal to generate some variance but not to go to extremes. You do this by dithering. Your never give outright compliments or insults. Your statements are always noisy and subject to interpretation. But the signal to noise ratio is not zero.
A full analysis of this problem would combine the tools of psychological game theory with persuasion mechanisms a’ la Gentzkow and Kamenica.
What do you do in the following awkward situation? your friend receives an invitation to a party. The host is also your friend but you haven’t received an invitation.
Was the invitation lost in the mail or were you not invited? You can’t ask the host directly because it would be too uncomfortable if the answer was you weren’t invited. But in the event that the invitation was lost in the mail it is in all parties’ interest in having that uncertainty resolved.
There would seem no custom that would allow communication of the good news and at the same time avoid communication of the bad news.
But RSVP does exactly that, as long as the custom is to RSVP both acceptances and regrets. Then if you were invited but you do not RSVP the host will know you didn’t get the invitation, and send a followup.
Game theorists will notice that the bad news can still be inferred. If the host does not follow up then you learn that you were not invited. But the beauty if this system is that it is never common knowledge. The host never knows with certainty that you know about the party you weren’t invited to. You know about the party but you know that the host does not know that you know, etc… This higher-order uncertainty goes a long way in alleviating the awkwardness.
More generally there is value in social conventions that allow non-public communication: exchange of information, especially bad news, without making that information common knowledge.
I am starting a new club. Charter membership is hereby bestowed upon everyone who would never be in a club that would have them as a member. You may quit for $100.
(By the way, I asked around nobody wants you in the club consisting of the complement of my club.)
Do you use opt-in or opt-out? That is, do you agree to meet unless one or more of the group calls and says they can’t make it, or do you agree only if enough of you call and say they can make it?
With opt-out each person has insufficient incentive to make the call. If she has already decided not to go, courtesy is the only motive for informing the others. Moreover even if she is courteous, since the call could kill the meeting, if she is not 100% sure she can’t make it, she has a private incentive to wait until the last minute to make the call, just in case.
With opt-in each person has stronger incentives to try to coordinate. Because if I want to go to the meeting and I don’t make the call it might not happen.
So, returning to the question in the title, it all depends on what you want. Opt-out minimizes the chance that the meeting will be cancelled, but probably also at the expense of minimizing attendance.
Musicians and academics are promiscuous collaborators. They flit from partnership to partnership sometimes for one-off gigs, sometimes for ongoing stints. In academia, regardless of the longevity of the group, the individual author is always the atomic unit. Co-authorships are identified simply with the names of the authors. Whereas musicians eventually form bands.
Bands have identities separate from the individuals in the bands. The name of the band stores that identity. It also solves a problem we face in academia of how to order the names of the contributors. You don’t. (There is evidence that the lexical ordering of names is good for Andersons and bad for Zames.) We should form bands too.
The idea of a band is important enough that sometimes even solo musicians incorporate themselves as bands. Roger Myerson is the Nine Inch Nails of game theory.
Bands work in the studio (writing papers) and then tour (giving seminars.) Musicians have two typical ways of organizing these. Jazz and pop bands create and perform as a group. Classical music is usually performed by specialists rather than the composer herself.
Our bands do something in between which is hard to understand when you think of it this way. We compose as a band but then perform as individuals. That’s weird because you would think that either you want to hear the composer do the performing or a performance specialist. If it is always the composer then it must be because the composer has a special insight into the performance. But then why not all of them? We should tour as bands some times. And we should also reward performance specialists who perform others’ work.
I want to name my bands. I want my next co-authored paper to be “by (insert name of band here) ” Sandeep, what do you say? Our torture paper will be “by Cheap Talk.” I look forward to making petulant demands and trashing hotel rooms.
Luca Malbec 2007. It’s Argentina in a bottle. The wine is huge, almost black, and over the top in terms of fruit extraction, oak, and alcohol (14.5%). The bottle itself weighs twice as much as wimpy French wine bottles.
Its perfectly agreeable wine but it has no complexity. It smells like you just walked into a tool shed and found a blueberry pie cooling on the shelf. And it is clearly built to stand up to those fat steaks Argies are so fond of. So as a vegetarian I have almost no use for this wine except for one thing. I am usually the only wine drinker in the house, so I drink a bottle over the course of a few days. This wine is so huge that it tastes exactly the same three days later as it did when I opened the bottle.
Now I have discovered a second thing. It makes a perfect pairing with dark Belgian chocolate. The chocolate masks some of the oak and dark fruit flavors and allows the slight acidity and strawberry flavors to come out and those perfectly complement the chocolate. These aspects are typical Argentinian Malbec so I would bet this pairing would work with any you can get your hands on.
I found this out because my daughters came home from a birthday party bringing a box of Belgian dark chocolate. The birthday girl’s father is a friend of ours who is Belgian, so that explains the chocolate. Now, his wife is from Argentina, and her father is a winemaker and yes, his best wine is a Malbec. So the pairing works on many levels.
“You’re a cad if you break up around Christmas. And then there’s New Year’s — and you can’t dump somebody right around New Year’s. After that, if you don’t jump on it, is Valentine’s Day,” Savage says. “God forbid if their birthday should fall somewhere between November and February — then you’re really stuck.
“Thanksgiving is really when you have to pull the trigger if you’re not willing to tough it out through February.”
That’s from a story I heard on NPR about turkey dropping: the spike in break-ups at Thanksgiving followed by a steady period (for the surviving pairs) through the Winter months. If there is a social stigma against cutting it off between Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day, then there may be value in that. Often social rules emerge arbitrarily but persist only if they serve a purpose, even if that purpose is unrelated to the spirit of the social norm. The post-turkey taboo plays the role of a temporary commitment that can strengthen those relationships that are still worth maintaining.
The value of a relationship fluctuates over time. Not just the total value of the partnership relative to autarky but also the value to the individual of remaining committed. The strength of a relationship is precisely measured by the maximum temptation each partner is willing to forego to keep it alive. The moment a jucier temptation appears, the relationship is doomed.
Unless there is commitment. Commitment is a way of pooling incentive constraints. A relationship becomes stronger if each partner can somehow commit in advance to resist all temptations that will arise over the length of the commitment. This transforms your obligation. Now the strength of the relationship is equal to the expected temptation rather than the most severe temptation actually realized. A social stigma against ending the relationship over certain intervals of time aids such a commitment.
Its good that commitments are temporary, but you want their beginning and end dates to be arbitrary, or at least independent of the arrival process of temptations. The total value of the relationship also fluctuates and you want the freedom to end the relationship when it begins to lag the value of being single. This is especially true in the early stages when there is still a lot to learn about the match. Over time when the value of the relationship has clarified, the length of commitment intervals should increase.
Commitments can also solve an unraveling problem. If you know that your partner will succumb to a juciy temptation and you know that its just a matter of time before a juicy temptation arrives, you become willing to give over to a just-a-little-juicy temptation. Knowing this, she is poised to give it up for just about anything. The commitment short-circuits this at the first step.
Karthik Shashidar writes to us:
I am a regular reader of your blog, and like most of the stuff that you guys put there. Yesterday while blogging, I came across something which I thought might interest you people, hence I’m writing to you.
Recently my girlfriend and I realized that we were spending way too much time talking to and thinking about each other, and that we needed to scale down in order to give us time to do other things that we want to do. Both of us are in extremely busy jobs and hence time available for other things (including each other) is very limited, and hence the need to scale down.
I was wondering why this is not a widespread phenomenon and why more couples don’t do this “scaling down”
His analysis is here.
There is a natural force pushing couples toward too much engagement. Unilateral escalations make your partner feel good. Even if you internalize the long-run cost due to the inevitable following-suit, the slightest bit of discounting means that the equilibrium level will be above the social optimum. The usual dynamic game logic seems especially perverse here. If I am extra sweet to my sweet does she punish me for that? And what form does the punishment take, even further escalation?
Negotiating down from these heights is indeed tricky. Unilateral de-escalation is risky as Karthik discusses on his blog. The proposal could easily be read as a cold shoulder. Even assuming that both agree to scale down, how do you decide where to go? It is not easy to describe in words a precise level of interaction and this ambiguity leads to the potential for hurt feelings, if there is mis-coordination.
Some dimensions are easier to contract on. It’s easy to commit to go out only on Tuesday nights. However, text messages are impossible to count and the distortions due to overcompensation on these slippery-slope dimensions may turn out even worse than the original state of affairs.
But even setting aside all of these problems, what mechanism can you use to coordinate on a lower scale? If we both make offers and split-the-difference, then the one asking for a higher scale is going to feel hurt. Any mechanism has got to be noisy enough to hide such inequities without being totally random. The trick may be to short-circuit common knowledge. For example we could have a third party make a take-it-or-leave-it proposal and then the two partners secretly reject (if too low) or accept (if not.) The proposal is enacted only if both accept.
This ensures that when the offer is accepted, both parties learn only that each was willing to scale down to at least the same level. And when the offer is rejected, the one who was not willing to go that low will never know whether the other was, i.e. no hurt feelings.
(dinner conversation with Utku, Samson, and Hideo.)
Read about it in the Wall Street Journal.
Many of his papers have been highly theoretical works focusing on imperfections in financial markets. “He’s probably the most abstract thinker ever to head a Federal Reserve bank,” said Robert Lucas, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who is serving as a consultant to the Minneapolis Fed.
Mr. Kocherlakota’s colleagues say he is a pragmatic person who is hard to identify fully with any one camp.
“He believes in the freshwater world, but he’s not that radical,” says Luigi Pistaferri, a frequent co-author with whom Mr. Kocherlakota worked for three years at Stanford University. “He agrees that there are market failures, and his attitude is, ‘How do we make the best of a world in which there are such failures?’ “
I once took Narayana to see The Bad Plus in Minneapolis on a visit there. Narayana is Canadian I believe and that night they busted out Tom Sawyer. I don’t think he was all that into it.
I assume this means we will need a new macro co-editor at Theoretical Economics. Volunteers?
There is strategy involved in giving and interpreting compliments. Let’s say you hear someone play a difficult –but not too difficult– piece on the piano, and she plays it well. Is it a compliment if you tell her she played it beautifully?
That depends. You would not be impressed by the not-so-difficult piece if you knew that she was an outstanding pianist. So if you tell her you are impressed, then you are telling her that you don’t think she is an outstanding pianist. And if she is, or aspires to be, an outstanding pianist, then your attempted compliment is in fact an insult.
This means that, in most cases, the best way to compliment the highly accomplished is not to offer any compliment at all. This conveys that all of her fine accomplishments are exactly what you expected of her. But, do wait for when she really outdoes herself and then tell her so. You don’t want her to think that you are someone who just never gives compliments. Once that is taken care of, she will know how to properly interpret your usual silence.
In the world of blogs, when you comment on an article on another blog, it is usually a nice compliment to provide a link to the original post. This is a compliment because it tells your readers that the other blog is worth visiting and reading. But you may have noticed that discussions of the really well-known blogs don’t come with links. For example, when I comment on an article posted at a blog like Marginal Revolution, I usually write merely “via MR, …” with no link.
That’s the best way to compliment a blog that is, or aspires to be, really well-known. It proves that you know that your readers already know the blog in question, know how to get there, and indeed have probably already read and pondered the article being discussed.
It is well-known that when you ask a person to construct a random sequence, say of zeroes and ones, the sequence they create differs in systematic ways from a “truly random” sequence. For example, they exhibit regression to the mean: the person constructing the sequence is too careful to make sure that the short-run averages are 50-50 resulting in too-frequent alternations between zero and one.
Knowing this, here is a simple bet you can use as a money pump at parties. Tell someone to write down a random sequence of heads and tails, and bet them that you can guess the numbers in their seqeunce. A simple strategy that correctly predicts more than 50% of the time is to randomly guess the first number and then guess that each subsequent number is the opposite of the previous. But if you study this article (and its links), you can refine your strategy and do even better.
And soon, as icing on the cake, you can offer your victim favorable odds, say you pay $1.10 every time you are wrong and she pays you $1.00 every time you are right. You will still make money.
Then after you have relieved your fellow revelers of their pocket cash, and they want to turn the tables on you, remember to use one of the coins you have just won to construct your sequence in a truly random fashion.
