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?
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!