Economic Valentines

Economic Valentines: I am generally weary of this holiday, but these are very funny. Pay attention to the one that has to do with the game theory (remember my posts here and here?)

Dating, War and Dr. Strangelove

I discussed recently dating from the point of view of market strategy, and also pointed out the link, where the game theory was applied to the same model. These things are more than  a joke: once upon a time the game theory was deciding the fate of the World: it was behind the American (and perhaps also Soviet) strategy during the Cold War era. 

This article discusses how game theory led to the Cold War episode, known as "Operation Gian Lance":
"Nixon's madman pose and Giant Lance were based on game theory, a branch of mathematics that uses simple calculations and rigorous logic to help understand how people make choices — like whether to surge ahead in traffic or whether to respond to a military provocation with a strike of one's own. The most famous example in the field is the Prisoner's Dilemma: If two criminal suspects are held in separate cells, should they keep mum or rat each other out? (Answer: They should keep quiet, but as self-interested actors, what they will do is betray each other and both go to jail.) In the Cold War, the "games" were much more complicated simulations of war and bargaining: Would the Soviets be more likely to attack Western Europe if we kept missiles there or if we didn't?

Kissinger had studied game theory as a young academic and strategic theorist at Harvard. In the early '60s, he was part of a group of World War II veterans who became the oracles or "whiz kids" of the nuclear age. Working at newly formed institutes and think tanks, like the RAND Corporation, they preached that the proper way to deal with the existence of nuclear weapons wasn't to act as if the situation was so grave that one couldn't even discuss using them; it was to figure out how to use them most effectively. This was the attitude mocked by Stanley Kubrik in Dr. Strangelove, in which RAND appears thinly disguised as the Bland Corporation."

Dating and the game theory

A game-theoretical approach to dating (with a bit of math). Note that the model is nearly identical to the one that I used in my recent post on dating, but the author develops the strategies to much greater extent:
"Here are some ground rules (basically the same rules as on MTV’s show Next):
1. You only date one person at a time.
2. A relationship either ends with you “rejecting” or “selecting” the other person.
3. If you “reject” someone, the person is gone forever. Sorry, old flames cannot be rekindled.
4. You plan on dating some fixed number of people (N) during your lifetime.
5. As you date people, you can only tell relative rank and not true rank. This means you can tell the second person was better than the first person, but you cannot judge whether the second person is your true love. After all, there are people you have not dated yet."

Added later:
All this is not as ridiculous, as it sounds - it is the algorithm that is used by most "single and looking" people that I know, particularly by those who use the internet dating. Even though most of them don't formulate it so clearly.

My article points out that this algorithm always fails, and that there is much truth to the statement that you meet your love when you are not really looking for it (i.e. when you don't bind yourself by silly rules.) - again, this is what many people who found a partner say.

The article, that I added today, has a definition of success in dating that is different from mine. It is certainly useless in terms of finding a soulmate. But if the goal is to get married  - it is a big improvement, compared to what most people normally do.

Dating as a market failure

I discuss a commonly used dating model and show that it is highly prone to failure. The only sensible alternative seems to be the age-old belief in an unexpected “romantic” encounter.

The idea of “romance” is ubiquitous in modern culture. Books, movies, and everyday conversations routinely tell us that there is one person that we are destined to be with, yet this person may turn out to be the complete opposite of what we imagine as our soul mate, and little can be done to increase the likelihood of meeting this person – it may happen anytime and anywhere…

… or not happen. Indeed, the “romantic” assumption looks quite unrealistic and we are frequently following a very different model of choosing a partner, which is described below.