Hi Natalie,
That's an interesting example, thanks.
I don't have a clear understanding of what happens mathematically in
game theory when a social dilemma has a very large number of players.
It seems that any one player's impact on the overall payoffs becomes
very close to zero. If it reached zero the situation might no longer
be a dilemma, or maybe not even a "game" - you would just bid the
amount that seems best. But since each person's bids have a slight
impact on the COE prices (just as each CD's loudness slightly
escalates or de-escalates the loudness war, in my example), this
becomes a social dilemma. (Not for the Singapore government, maybe -
it seems like a very clever way of raising revenue by getting people
to pay the maximum they're willing to pay for a car.)
Unlike a 2-player prisoner's dilemma, there's no way to identify
other players and how much they've bid, and even if there were, there
are so many players that it's hard to have any leverage over any of
them.
I don't know if it's a wrong game situation. In the loudness war,
record companies may be playing the wrong game if louder doesn't
really sell better. With the car ownership scheme, it's clear that
bidding more makes it more likely that you'll get to use a car; it's
just that people are in the dark about the exact threshold. Anyway,
good food for thought.
Regards,
Earl
Hi Earl,
Welcome!
You have fascinating questions. Perhaps I may offer an example from
the tiny red dot of Singapore, although this may not be purely a
case of a wrong game.
Singapore is an island limited by a lack of natural resources
(including land area) and challenges of a growing population. So in
order to control the number of cars and traffic the government
established a system known as the car ownership scheme, where one
would have to purchase a certificate of entitlement - COE (like a
license) to drive a car for 10 years.
These licenses are given out every month of course, and people can
also renew their licenses if they wish to. However to get a license
one will have to bid for them, and it can be any amount.
The interesting bit lies in the bidding wars that people engage in,
thereby driving the prices of COEs much higher than they should be.
People are playing the prisoner's dilemma - they have no idea what
others are bidding so they put in bids as high as they could afford
in the attempt to secure them. As I write, the latest price of a COE
to own a car in the large-car category is now more than S$45k,
whereas in the past it had costed as low as S$2. Although the
objective of controlling the number of cars seems to be addressed,
no one really benefit from this, because everyone is doing the same
thing and it affects the motor industry as a whole. At the same
time, there have been reports of car owners wanting to drive their
cars as much as possible, since they paid so much for them.
While this may not be purely a case of a wrong game (since the
perception of COEs is that they're scarce, and in reality it is
based on how many the government wishes to release into the market),
I wonder if there is a certain critical threshold by which it
becomes a wrong game.
My two cents.
Regards,
Natalie
Sent from my iPhone.
On Sep 2, 2010, at 9:48 PM, Earl Vickers <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Howard and all,
Glad to find this group!
I'm finishing up a paper for the Audio Engineering Society that
analyzes the "loudness war" in terms of game theory and cooperation
theory. Basically, the loudness war involves the fact that record
companies are applying more and more dynamic range compression to
CDs to try to make each one louder than all the others. As a
result, CDs now have less dynamic range than a 1909 Edison cylinder
(!), and people end up tuning out because of listening fatigue and
lack of dynamics and excitement. (This has nothing to do with the
final playback volume - listeners have their own volume controls
and can turn it up as loud as they want - it just relates to
producers squashing the dynamics.)
>
So the idea is that each company tries to make their CDs the
loudest, but since everyone is doing that, they end up with no real
advantage, and it may be adversely affecting the overall industry -
a typical social dilemma. Among other things, I'm presenting some
studies showing that we may have gone to loudness war based on a
lie: while listeners do prefer the louder of two otherwise
identical recordings, loudness appears to have an insignificant
effect when choosing between two different songs. Also, there
appears to be no significant correlation between loudness and sales
rankings. It looks like people may buy music primarily because they
like it, not because it's louder than other music.
I'm looking for a real-world example of people playing the wrong
game based on false assumptions - for example, playing a
non-(prisoner's)-dilemma as if it were a dilemma, or playing a
non-zero-sum game as if it were zero-sum. Any ideas?
Earl
http://www.sfxmachine.com
Thanks for nudging us awake again, Robert. I know that several
people have joined in recent weeks. I am still interested in the
subject and I use http://cooperationcommons.com -- especially the
summaries -- all the time.
Howard Rheingold [email protected] http://twitter.com/hrheingold
http://www.rheingold.com http://www.smartmobs.com
http://vlog.rheingold.com
what it is ---> is --->up to us
On Sep 1, 2010, at 9:16 AM, Robert Link wrote:
CoCos,
We've been quiet quite a while. What are folks up to? I have added a
handful of new names to the list today, and hope they will each
introduce themselves to the group. Likewise, it would be great to hear
from each and everyone one of you. Does CoCo still represent a resource
to you? How best can we reactivate you? You, personally, as an
individual?
As for me, I've taken the California Bar a 3rd time since my last post,
and am currently working on setting up a drupal site for a local
volunteer board. This put me on the #drupal-support channel in freenode,
where I spotted one of our own.
Peace,
rl
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