The Winner’s Rendition of Game Theory
Sven Gelbhaar
1/12/2019
Let’s say that you are a soldier in WW2, and that you have gleaned an adequate
amount of winning strategies that you and your fellow soldiers could apply.
How much of these do you share with the new recruits?
If you gave them all your hard-won knowledge, then you no longer have your edge
because now you’ve increased the likelihood that the enemy will counter these
new strategies, or maybe now that you’ve raised the new soldiers’ chances of
winning/surviving, you have actually increased your own chances of catching a
bullet because the enemy doesn’t have easy targets to pick off.
You see this in capitalism too. Just the other day I saw an advertisement that
a millionaire had tips to share with the general public. My instant reaction
was that he’ll inflate consumer confidence and thereby the value of his
holdings. For instance: the millionaire owns stock which are worth less than
he’d like, so he tells people in general (his future buyers) that the company
in which he owns stock now as a new, battle-tested CEO. Maybe the next
innovative and society shaping set of products/services will be incorporated
by that company. It doesn’t matter if any of these facts are true, because now
they have a higher perceived-value which has the real-world consequence of
raising the price of the company’s stock which the millionaire can now sell in
his own created bubble for a lot more money than if he hadn’t shared those
‘facts.’
The secret then is to give your peers a couple of pointers, because that’s
expected, but to keep your really important survival tricks to yourself.
How might one apply this method? In the movie /A Beautiful Mind/, the
example of Game Theory was that the main character was at a bar with his
friends and colleagues and a group of women entered the bar. Most of the girls
were pretty enough, but there was one exceptionally beautiful girl. The main
character then proposed that he and his friends should court only the pretty
girls because they’d get in each others’ way if they all competed for the
beauty. This way everyone, including the pretty girls, would be happier than
if the male-group hadn’t applied this strategum.
What about the beautiful girl? And how would one win as a group member of the
(guy-) Mathematicians? Easy. You sell your friends on traditional Game Theory,
that is: non-competition, but you yourself hold back. All the pretty girls
will feel flattered, and everyone pairs up as a couple. Now the beautiful girl
is sitting there (mostly) alone and feeling rejected, and that’s when you
insinuate yourself into the female group and pick up the beautiful woman.
Everyone wins, although your friends might be slightly upset with you if they
find out you did it intentionally. Therefore just tell your friends you saw the
beautiful girl all alone and felt bad for her. I’m sure they’ll understand,
unless they have read this paper too.
I leave it to you, dear reader, to find real-world applications of this
strategy for yourself. Try and have a good time, which should be pretty easy
now that you’ll win the ultimate prize without your peer-group getting
resentful.