Rollback Analysis: Should you date your co-workers?

Anyone who is single has probably thought to him or herself “where can I meet someone?” Non-single people will commonly say things like, “oh, you should have your friends set you up” or “have you been going to church?” But, there are often mixed reactions as to whether or not singles should be looking for that special someone at work. Why is that? I think there are two reasons:

1) People value the payoffs differently: If people value finding love infinitely higher than they value their reputation at work, then they will always give you the advice to date at work. In the decision tree, that means that they value the payoffs of B infinitely higher than the negative payoffs associated with D. Maybe they value the payoffs this way because they are just truly romantic people. Alternatively, the negative payoffs associated with D may not be as bad to them. Perhaps they tend to change companies a lot, and therefore the loss of reputation or awkward situation in one workplace is not as big of a deal in their eyes.

2) People assign different probabilities to the outcomes: Everyone always has an opinion as to whether or not they think a relationship will work (perhaps this is why Us Weekly does so well on the newsstands). So, if you are getting dating advice from someone, they will either consciously or sub-consciously assign a probability to the relationship working out. In the decision tree below you can see how changes to probabilities of a co-worker being the love or your life or not can completely change the outcome of the game. Or, despite whether or not they think the relationship will work out, the person who you are seeking advice from may assign different probabilities to the relationship ending amicably or bitterly. So, you may hear things like “yeah, but even if it doesn’t work out, he is such a nice guy he would never say anything bad about you.” Or “he is very mature and will value your privacy even if you break up.” These opinions will change the rollback analysis as well.

All in all, I believe that - since the payoffs and probabilities of success and failure in this game are completely subjective – this age-old question will continue to puzzle singles everywhere. What do you think?

Who Gets the Name When a Band Breaks Up?

http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/05/29/ozzy-osbourne-suing-tony-iommi-for-black-sabbath-name/

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2009/10/28/is-the-music-sublime-without-brad-nowell/

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Former-Doors-Drummer-John-Densmore-Wins-Name-Lawsuit-5356.shtml


There has been no shortage of band breakups over the years. In addition, bands often continually evolve where some members leave and others stay – but the name stays the same. The articles above represent just a few of the many disputes over which member of a band has legal rights to use the name when members go their separate ways.

The news stories above reminded me of the HP Young article “Dividing the Indivisible.” When a band breaks up, which distributive principle is “fair” to use to determine who has rights to the name?

An Argument for Parity – maybe all band members hould be treated equally. Since they were all in the band and contributed to its success, all members should get equal rights to the name.

An Argument for Proportionality – some may argue that all band members do not contribute equally to the band’s success, and thus have different claims to the name. One band that comes to mind is Of Montreal. Front man Kevin Barnes is primarily responsible for writing and recording all of the band’s music, and his is also the best known in the media as the face of Of Montreal. Should Kevin, therefore, be the only one with rights to the name if the band were to change?

An Argument for Priority – with this argument, perhaps the founding member of the band is the one who should retain ownership of the name. John Lennon (or his estate), for instance, could argue that since he was the founding member of the Beatles, he should have sole rights to the name.

Another interesting idea is the modes of division of a name. Sometimes the courts grant sole custody to one member with the greatest claim. Or the band’s brand could be sold and the monetary proceeds divided between the members. Somestime the name is “physically” divided. (or band members use some, but not all, of the original name) The Grateful Dead is a good examaple here. After Jerry Garcia died, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart, and Bill Kreutzmann formed a band which eventually was called The Dead.

It will continue to be interesting to see how this issue plays out with different bands over time.

A Sub-Optimum Solution in a Dormitory Hall

During my freshman year in college, I lived in a very large, all-girls dorm on campus. Now, it is no secret that the weather can get very hot and humid in Georgia. Sometimes the hot weather made living in the dorms miserable.

So, you may be thinking that my dorm didn’t have any air conditioning. Not true! The problem arose from the fact that the dorm’s air conditioning was only effective when everyone kept their windows closed. The game in the dorm looked like this:

1. If I close my window but my neighbor opens her window, then my room will be unbearably hot (no A/C and no breeze from outside)

2. Anytime I open my window – no matter what my neighbor does – my room will be hot… but not as hot as it would be in option 1 (while the A/C won’t work, I will still benefit from the breeze)

3. If I close my window and my neighbor closes her window, then the air conditioning will work and my room will be cool

Therefore, the game actually had two Nash equilibrium based on the payoffs (here I have simplified the logic into a two person game):




While theoretically everyone was better off by closing her window, that’s not how the game played out. When I would get home from class around lunch time, I could look up and see a sprinkling of open windows. By the afternoon, as the temperature outside rose, the number of people who opened their window grew considerably. By nighttime, everyone would give up, open their window, and do their best to try to sleep in the hot dorm.

It was interesting… my hall would have meetings and get everyone to agree to keep their window shut the next day. But without fail, I would come home from class, look up, and see open windows scattered throughout the dorm. So, even if one hall signaled for cooperation, it was no help to the problem.

My opinion is that there were some residents in the dorm who were “not all there.” (they must have somehow missed the signs from the RA’s saying “please shut your windows so the A/C will work”) Their lack of awareness to the payoffs of the game made attaining the optimal solution difficult. But the inability to identify who those people were made attaining the optimal solution impossible. The dorm was too big to be able to look up and pinpoint which windows were open each day. Therefore, there was no way to go knock on doors and ask for cooperation.

I would be interested in going back to see if the same dynamic still played out today. Perhaps all the RA’s decided to fix the problem by becoming the daily window enforcers. Who knows? All I know is I was happy to move into a cooler apartment sophomore year.

Tri-State Water Wars – Distributive or Integrative Bargaining?

For nearly twenty years, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida have been fighting over the rights to water from the ACF and ACT River Basins. All three states have competing demands for the use of the water; consumption, economic development, irrigation, fish and wildlife protection, and recreation are just a few of the many uses that have been identified along the way.

So, what in the world is taking so long? There seem to be many reasons for the stand-off. To start, the twenty-year negotiation has been marked by a tremendous amount of political and legal maneuvering. Neither state politicians nor Congress are willing to take a stand; everyone keeps pointing the finger at someone else to resolve the dispute. Who even has the final legal authority to make (or veto) a decision seems like a complicated matter. Furthermore, in non-draught periods, the issue seems less timely. As media coverage dies down during these periods, there is not as much political pressure to reach an agreement and the negotiation continues to drag on.

The number one reason, though, I think the three states have failed to reach an agreement is due to a distribution bargaining approach to the situation. Media coverage indicates that each state is stuck on arguing over how much water it should get. In order for one state to do better, the other two states have to do worse. In this way, the negotiation comes down to a value judgment: is Atlanta’s growth “more important” than Florida’s marine life or Alabama’s own economic growth? As a practical matter, no one is going to be able to make such a decision.

A better solution would be for the states to approach the dispute as an integrative negotiation opportunity. If Florida’s oysters require a certain amount of flow from Lake Lanier in order to survive, then what else can Florida offer Georgia to compensate for the water? Maybe Florida could make a cash side payment to Georgia to fund rebates for low-flow toilets. Or, maybe there is something completely outside of the arena of water that Florida could provide Georgia as compensation. Maybe political votes in Georgia’s favor for some different matter in Washington? Or what about guaranteed rights to some big economic development opportunity in the region?

I predict that an integrative approach will ultimately be what helps the three states reach an agreement. After a federal judge ruled against Georgia in July in the matter of withdrawals from Lake Lanier, a group called the ACF Stakeholders was formed to help develop a solution to the problem. Since ACF Stakeholders represents a diverse group of people, its members should be able to think creatively about possible solutions. I also predict that with this new group, a solution will be reached during a time when there is minimal media coverage (like now, when there has been ample rainfall in the region). Since the group is not made up of elected officials, it should be less interested in playing out the debate in the news. I expect that whatever integrative solution is reached will include many side payments and will ultimately receive minimal media coverage. In my mind, a non-descript ending to this bitter debate would be best.

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and Game Theory

Spoiler Alert! If you have not seen this movie yet, you may want to refrain from reading any further. Plot elements will be revealed.

Inglourious Basterds is a Quentin Tarantino film set in Nazi-occupied France during WWII. The movie weaves together the story (one surely not found in history books) of two different schemes to assassinate top Nazi leadership. The movie is incredibly suspenseful, and, in hindsight, I realized that concepts from game theory created much of the film’s suspense. I could give a million examples of game theory from the film, but have chosen three key ideas.

1) Reputation and the Credibility of Threats

Acquiring a reputation is an effective way of making threats or promises credible. One’s reputation can influence behavior in either a repeated game with the same players, or in different games played with different players (assuming opponents are aware of your previous actions).

Reputation is used effectively by two main entities in Inglourious Basterds: 1) Colonel Hans Landa, a German SS officer known as the “Jew Hunter”, and 2) the Inglourious Basterds, a group of eight Jewish-American soldiers whose mission is to savagely kill as many Nazis as possible. In the opening scene of the movie, Landa admits “I…love my unofficial title [as the “Jew Hunter”] precisely because I’ve earned it.”

Both Landa and the Basterds go to great lengths to make their brutality known. For instance, they each use vile killing tactics, making sure there is someone present at the killings who can spread the word about what happened. The Basterds, for instance, scalp their victims, carve swastikas on their foreheads, and even have a member known as the “Bear Jew” who specializes in beating the German soldiers’ brains out with a baseball bat. The Basterds periodically leave one victim alive who can go back to the German army and add tales to the group’s folklore.

Landa and the Basterds each understand the value of their reputation. When entering a game situation with a new player, both Landa and the Basterds open the conversation by forcing their opponent to acknowledge their brutish reputation. Some version of the question “what have you heard” is used repeatedly throughout the movie.

Here are two examples of how Landa and the Basterds use reputation to influence behavior:

* Landa: In the opening scene of Inglourious Basterds, Landa interrogates Perrier LaPadite, a French dairy farmer who Landa believes is hiding a Jewish family in his home. LaPadite – who is indeed harboring a Jewish family of five – has previously had his home searched by the SS and was not found out. However, the “Jew Hunter” uses his reputation to convince LaPadite that he will be successful in finding the Jewish family, where the other search party was unsuccessful. Landa assures LaPadite that if he points out the family’s hiding place to Landa, then the SS will leave the LaPadite family alone. Otherwise, if LaPadite does not reveal the hiding space and Landa still finds the family, then LaPadite’s daughters will be harmed. Essentially, Landa uses his reputation so that LaPadite assigns a probability of 100% that Landa will find the family. Thus, LaPadite is forced to reveal the Jewish family in order to protect his own family.

* Basterds: In Chapter Two of the film, we see Lt. Raine (Brad Pitt) of the Basterds interrogate two captured members of the German army to try to obtain information about the whereabouts of other German forces. Although he acknowledges his knowledge of the Basterds reputation for violence, the first German soldier refuses to reveal information that would put German lives in danger. He subsequently gets his brains beat in with a baseball bat by the “Bear Jew.” The first German soldier obviously valued the good of the German army over his own life. The second captured German soldier, after hearing the Basterds reputation AND seeing the fate of the first soldier, quickly reveals the army’s whereabouts upon his interrogation. By acting quickly and violently with the first solder – and thus authenticating their violent reputation – the Basterds were able to influence the second soldier’s behavior.

2) Who do you trust?

In his article “Rethinking Trust,” Roderick M. Kramer asserts that humans are social beings who are inherently wired to trust others. Kramer identifies some of the elements involved in the psychology of our decision making to trust. For example, confirmation bias is the tendency to skew our judgment to see what we want to see. Implicit theories involve how we use stereotypes to relate observable cues to underlying psychological traits. Lastly, the illusion of personal invulnerability demonstrates how – even if we acknowledge that certain risks exist – we believe that we are unlikely to experience misfortune.

The element of trust is exploited in Chapter 5 of Inglourious Basterds, “Revenge of the Giant Face.” The plot by Shosanna Dreyfus to burn down the Nazi-filled theater is well under way. Shosanna is busy carrying out her plan when she is interrupted by Frederick Zoller (a German war-hero who is smitten with Shosanna but who has repeatedly been rejected by the girl). Shosanna tries to shoo Zoller away; however, he gets angry, refuses to leave, and forcefully tells Shosanna to stop disrespecting him. Shosanna, realizing he won’t leave, exploits his infatuation with her. She tells Zoller to come into the room and lock the door, vaguely hinting that they will subsequently hook up. As he comes in, Shosanna shoots Zoller for dead with her hidden pistol. Shosanna then apparently starts to feel pity, and approaches the dying Zoller. Zoller turns over and – much to her surprise – shoots Shosanna dead with his dying breaths.

Some thoughts about trust in this brutal scene:

* Why in the world did Zoller trust Shosanna enough to enter the projector room? Obviously Zoller thought he was going to hook up. However, there is no way a rational person would really believe Shosanna was interested in hooking up with him. She had been completely rude to Zoller the whole movie. I assert that there was some major confirmation bias at work here. Zoller heard what he wanted to hear when Shosanna unenthusiastically invited him in the room. He never considered that he might be in danger.

* Shosanna was no less erroneous in her decision to trust in this scene. Why would she approach a moaning war hero that she had just shot? She trusted that - because Zoller was in love with her and dying - he would do her no harm. To her demise, Shosanna was guilty of the illusion of personal invulnerability.

* Lastly, I think both Shosanna and Zoller were guilty of bringing an implicit theory into their decisions to trust. Both were extremely attractive individuals. I think the bias here was that attractive people are automatically more trustworthy. Zoller throughout the movie – and Shosanna at the very end – automatically granted trust based on looks alone.

All in all, Tarantino brillently exploits the psychology of trust in this violent scene.

3) Changing the Game

A key theme of the Strategic Decision Analysis class has been to identify games and their features, and then, if possible, look for ways to change the game to your advantage.

In the closing scenes of the movie, Landa appears to have come out on top. He has given up the Nazis and made a deal with the Americans (a deal that includes a Congressional Medal of Honor and property on Nantucket Island).

However, as Lt. Raine (Brad Pitt) is dropping Landa off at the American lines, he suddenly finds a way to change the game. Raine knows he will probably be reprimanded fiercely if he kills Landa. However, he also can’t stand the idea of a Nazi like Landa living a plush life on Nantucket Island, with no one knowing the heinous crimes that Landa has committed.

Therefore, Raine decides to change the game by carving a swastika in Landa’s forehead. That way, even if Landa takes off his uniform, he will still be identifiable as a Nazi for the rest of his life. Raine has abided by all the rules of the game, but still managed to change it to his advantage. Bravo.