Comment on Nash Equilibria and Schelling Points

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 19:27:48 GMT

The doctor walks in, face ashen. "I'm sorry- it's likely we'll lose her or the baby. She's unconscious now, and so the choice falls to you: should we try to save her or the child?" The husband calmly replies, "Revoke!"

An eloquent way of pointing out what I was missing. Thank you!

In non-story format: How do you formalize the difference between someone telling you bad information and someone causing you to be in a worse situation?

I will try to think on this more. The only thing that's occurred to me so far is that if that it seems like if you have a formalization, it may not be a good idea to announce your formalization. Someone who knows your formalization might be able to exploit it by customizing their imposed worse situation to look like simply telling you bad information, their intentional harm to look like accidental harm, or their blackmail to extort the maximum amount of money out of you, if they had an explicit set of formal rules about where those boundaries were.

And for instance, it seems like a person would prefer it someone else blackmailed that person less than they could theoretically get away with because they were being cautious, rather than having every blackmailer immediately blackmail at maximum effective blackmail. (at that point, since the threshold can change)

Again, I really do appreciate you helping me focus my thoughts on this.

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