I’m kinda frustrated. Living in Europe in a country where you are more or less protected against layouts, were unions are allowed to exist. Jet it is so difficult to get the people to get their head out of their butts to do some solidarity or even improve their own conditions.
Companies doesn’t respect some basic laws and rights, people has been angry for 15 years and always complaining.
Despite of that, when asking people to organize, join an union or do even at least a day of strike, people start saying that it is not worth it, that it is not important. The most they accept doing is stop to work a couple of hours to complain at the gate like a kids rant.
I know for sure that workers have power. The company makes more money per worker and day that double de amount they pay us, so stopping working would hurt them more than us. Why do people lacks so much class conciseness? It is even more hurting for people working at a desk with a suit and doing economics, it’s like they think of themselves as if they were some kind of privileged when are just workers. Why do people chicken out so much when going on strike?
Have you ever tried to get a large group to unanimously agree to ANYTHING?
Throw in the chance that they may all lose their jobs and it gets exponentially more difficult.
yeah, I am a dungeon master, but for strikes, when applying games theory, it’s only logical to stick together and go on strike.
The problem with game theory is that it assumes everyone involved is perfectly rational.
On the contrary, game theory doesn’t assume rationality or irrationality whatsoever. Game theory looks at all possible outcomes and investigates different strategies that lead to those outcomes.
Rational strategies can lead to defection in games like the non-iterated prisoner’s dilemma, and this is a Nash equilibrium. However, the infinite iterated prisoner’s dilemma allows cooperation to emerge even with rational strategies.
The superrational strategy leads to cooperation even in a one-shot gang of prisoner’s dilemma
I honestly know nothing about game theory, so I don’t doubt that there are aspects that account for irrational behavior like meaningless self sabotage, but I don’t recall the prisoner’s dilemma having allowing one of the prisoners to specifically choose to be imprisoned for the maximum sentence in exchange for the other prisoner to also be imprisoned that same amount. Is there a version that has that option, or something similar? Every version I’ve seen assumes they would never do something so completely against their own self-interest.
One of the most common reasons for people not coming together I’ve seen is the classic “Sure, this makes it harder for everyone, but we can weather it so long as we know it’s harder for those damn (insert innocent group here)!” which of course only makes things unnecessarily harder for both groups, and only benefits their shared enemies. If that’s not something that game theory would cover, then I don’t know how well it would be able to be applied to our inability to organize effective resistance to an oppressive government.
If it is something that’s covered, I’d love an example! I could use a bit of hope that we’ll rise up eventually.
I guess I should explain a bit more then.
The term “player” in game theory doesn’t mean a person, it means a collection of rows or columns in a payoff matrix. Basically just a table of numbers. One player is all the rows, one player is all the columns.
A strategy can be either a pure strategy (select one row or one column of the table) or a mixed strategy (assign percentages to every row or every column of the table, so that all percentages are non-negative and the total equals 100%).
In a 2x2 payoff matrix, each player has 2 possible pure strategies (pick column A or column B, row 1 or row 2) but infinite possible mixed strategies (e.g 33.186794% column A and 66.813206% column B) since an infinite number of pairs of percentages can add up to 100%.
Mixed strategies can be thought of as introducing probability into the situation. If you choose a mixed strategy of 50% column A and 50% column B you could think of it as using a coin toss to make the decision. But game theory itself doesn’t do the coin tossing, it just assumes the expected values of the percentage times the payoffs in those entries of the payoff matrix.
So it’s just theoretical mathematics based on a given amount of assumed possible choices? Is there even a way to truly apply it to a real-world scenario as complicated as large-group human behavior?
For large group behaviour you’re better off looking at cooperative game theory which is a branch of game theory that deals with games of more than 2 players and the formation of cooperating groups known as coalitions.
It’s a much more complex topic than basic 2 player strategic game theory, so I don’t see it discussed nearly as much outside of subject matter experts.
Ah, gotcha. Still, looks like a fun read - I’ll check it out. Thanks for taking the time to explain it!
What? Players acting rationally is one of the core assumptions of game theory. Sure there are some models that attempt to account for irrationality, but the conclusions are obviously much less definitive.
It can’t really be any other way, perfectly rational actors are predictable in a mathematical way. Irrational actors are irrational in many different ways. One irrational actor might betray a fellow prisoner purely out of spite, another might refuse to speak purely out of a sense of loyalty. Another might make a decision compulsively without any strategy at all.
Irrational players cannot be analyzed mathematically. You cannot find a dominant strategy playing against irrational players, at least not a non-trivial one. Sure you can try to analyze them, but then you’ve left math behind and have wandered into psychology or sociology.
You clearly have not studied game theory, as you are talking out of your ass. Go pick up a textbook and learn something.
Sure, I can only go off what I’ve read. Would you like to recommend a textbook which goes into making predictions when playing a game with irrational players?
Any mathematical textbook will do it. Try Springer.
It’s quite simple really. Games in game theory are represented with a payoff matrix which shows the utility for each player. Pure strategies are defined as rows or columns in the payoff matrix. The math of game theory doesn’t care about why a player chooses a particular strategy, only its payoff.
I would define a purely rational player at minimum as one chooses a dominant strategy, when one is available. You’re free to expand that to mixed strategies and games where (strong or weakly) dominant strategies do not exist. Irrational players would be anyone who is otherwise not a rational player.
This isn’t very interesting in basic game theory. It becomes a lot more relevant in cooperative game theory, which can have more than 2 players and players forming coalitions.
So, you definitely know that no matter how well you spell it all out for them, someone’s going to go murder hobo and fuck it all up.
Also need people to agree on what they want to get out of a strike, and be okay with losing income for the duration of it.
Very true. Most places I worked, people were afraid to take a day off for doctors appointments, voting, or other obligations because that’s money they wouldn’t have. Just imagine getting them to agree to no pay for as long as it takes!