Search Results for 'negotiator'

Best Negotiator Ever

With a hat tip to Kenneth Anderson at the Volokh Conspiracy:

Golden Balls is a British game show where players decide, in secret, whether to adopt a strategy of “Split” or “Steal”. In this episode, they face the following payoffs (in British pounds):

This is almost, but not quite a classic Prisoner’s Dilemma situation. (To make it a true Prisoner’s Dilemma, where stealing always beats splitting, you could change the lower-right hand box to “1 each” instead of “0 each”.) As in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, you can never go wrong by stealing — though you can go horribly wrong when the other guy steals, so it makes sense to reach a no-stealing agreement — and then to violate it.

In other words you’d pretty much expect homo economicus to steal every time. But this game is far more interesting than the usual textbook version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, because it’s played by real people for real money and they negotiate in public for half a minute before they choose their strategies. In principle, the negotiation shouldn’t change anything (unless the players come to care about each other, or about the way they’re perceived by the audience). But in this episode, the negotiation took an unexpected turn.

Continue reading ‘Best Negotiator Ever’

Share

Letter to a Reporter

I suspect we’re all getting bored of talking about Sandra Fluke, contraception policy, alternative solutions, and the reaction thereto, but I’ve just had an email from a reporter who’s confused on a point so basic, I thought it might be worth clearing it up for a larger audience.

The reporter writes:

As you might suspect, I disagree with your assertion that “All she said, in effect, was that she and others want contraception and they don’t want to pay for it.” I was wondering if you happened to catch the part of her speech where she talked about wanting women whose doctors have prescribed birth control pills to treat medical disorders like endometriosis to be able to get such drugs without having to pass tests demanded by religious institutions? Is this an unimportant part of the debate?

Here is a slightly edited version of my reply:

Continue reading ‘Letter to a Reporter’

Share