Game Theory

This past weekend I visited my parents with the Fiancee. Dad has a number of health issues, topped by Parkinson's. The medication they give you for this is pretty nasty, it helps with the symptoms but gives you hallucinations. He has had very bad ones, and as a result they have taken him off the medication. The hallucinations are getting better, he is left with the awful sight of bugs in his skin, he thinks that there are nests of them under his arms and sees the feelers.

When I got there, he seemed better, but still weak, needing almost constant care and monitoring. My mom is doing a terrific job, but she is human and needs a break. So my brother and mom and I have all decided that she needs home assistance for dad two days a week for a few hours, just to get out and do errands and meet friends for lunch. This is critical as the experience has been stressing her out.

Did I tell you that my dad is a piece of work? A nasty alcoholic, he turned into a paranoid, needy old man, terrified that my mother would leave him. God knows, no one could have blamed her. But she has stood by him for over 46 years. Well, the old man is convinced that the home health care is a plot to let mom get out of his sight and start running around on him.

So today I call dad and break the news on the home health care. No way he says. I am insistent, mom needs breaks and he needs constant care. He tells me he does not need the pressure. I tell him it is not about him, mom needs a break and he cannot be left alone. Finally I tell him to think about it and we will talk later.

Mom calls me thirty minutes later, (we had arranged for me to make this call while I was out there). Apparently after the call, dad perked up, wanted to go run errands and declared that he no longer saw the bugs. It's a miracle.

Amazing.

The games we play to try to manipulate the world, even when we don't really know why.

Game Theory is the study of, well, games. Not games of chance, that is a different discipline all together. Game theory, first worked out by John Nash, is a mathematical theory of conflict situations where n groups of individuals can take y strategies to achieve z outcomes with different "payoffs". Fascinating topic, I was first introduced to it by a book " The Ropes You Skip and the Ropes You Know", a little treaste on behavior in corporations.

By the way, Nash was nuts. Saw people that were not there.

One particular game of interest is the "Prisoners Dilemma". You see it played out every week on "Law and Order". Two suspects are put in different rooms and told that the first one to spill the beans and rat on their partner gets a deal, the other gets the max jail time. Each has the same problem. If both keep their mouth shut, then they both stay out of jail. If one guy spills the beans then, he gets a deal, not as good as staying out of jail, but a better payoff then the schlub that keeps quiet, since schlub now gets the max penalty. The result is that they both spill the beans, getting a worse "payoff" than if they just kept their mouth shut.

The problem is one of trust in the face of incomplete information. Neither knows what the other is going to say or do, and so, have to assume the worst from the other and act accordingly, even though the result is much less that if they could just trust the other.

Prisoner's Dilemma is one of the three basic games, it shows up all the time in human interactions, situations where cooperation would give the best outcome, but the possibility of one of the participants gaining advantage by not cooperating forces all participants to not cooperate, providing the next to worse outcome for everyone. Almost ever situation in human commerce and governance displays aspects and versions of the Prisoner's Dilemma.

A converse version of this game is the problem of the common garden. In this one, if all the neighbors pitch in to keep up a common held park, then all benefit. But if one guy shirks, he gets the benefit without the work, getting a better payoff. The result, no one works on the park and it turns to weeds. Anyone ever involved in volunteer work can identify with this one.

So how do you solve prisoners dilemma?

Big question with no easy answers. On the grand scale of nation states a lot of very smart people get to spend an awful lot of money to solve this Dilemma.

At the micro level, between two people, the answer is a bit more straightforward:

Trust, and behave in a way that is trustworthy.

In one regard, all the ethics and morals and taboos about keeping your word, speaking the truth, holding fast to your vows, are all cultural mechanisms to get around the terrible logic of the PD. At the most fundamental level we are all prisoners, unable to hear the internal conversations in the head of the person next to us, tempted to believe the worst and act accordingly. Without trust, human relations and thus human survival would be impossible.

Very pollyannish, you might say. Truth is, lots of people lie. They lie mostly to rig the game. You see, in a lot of these game situations, lying does improve your chances of winning. Cheating does work, it gets you what you want at the expense of the other players. Lying to your wife gets you hot sex with the bombshell at work and a home cooked meal.

What can confuse game theorists is not that we do lie or cheat or assume the worst to get the best outcome. After all, that is what the simple game matrices predict. What confuses them is when it doesn't work, when we play fair. Game theorists have set up experiments where a person assigns payoffs to himself and other players. The theoretical out come should be that the decicing player gets all the winnings, the game is set up to solve that way. What happens, much to the scientists chagrin, is that people generally allocate fairly and share.

What they came to realize is that most of life is not a single one time game, but a repeated series of the same game, over and over. You can cheat once and win, but the next time you are known as a cheater, and no one wants your participation. (Assuming they did not drag you out onto the ice and leave you there, something the Eskimos have been known to do to white guys that give offence, or so I have been told.)

The necessity of playing the same game over and over with the same people changes the structure and payoff matrix of the game, to where things like lying and cheating become bad strategies and things like Honor and equitable sharing and reputation and honest behavior become winning ways. In the long run, right action wins out.

Such it is with relationships, with lovers, friends, family and co workers. You think you can cheat them and get one over, but over time, you get found out. Eventually, no one believes you any more, and knowing you are a cheater, a manipulator out only for yourself, they no longer choose to play with you, and though you win a couple of battles, in the end you lose the war. They cannot know your thoughts, and they cannot trust you, and they are left only assuming the worst.

And we wind up alone, spinning our schemes in our head while a world that is done with us and our lies moves on.

Some of us even act suprised and wonder why.