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gwern comments on Bargaining and Auctions - Less Wrong
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I think I've heard this phrase somewhere before. Would a 'womanly understanding' be the female counterpart of a 'gentleman's agreement'? "We had a womanly understanding not to dress too fancily to the event, and I was glad to see that she wore her hemp necklace instead of her most elegant pearl necklace."
A 'tacit understanding' or 'tacit agreement' can be the gender neutral in many instances wherein 'gentleman's agreement' is used, but indeed I don't think the former can denote all that the latter connotes.
Perhaps this says more about me than other people, but when you wrote 'womanly understanding', I expected it to immediately be broken in some sort of backstabbing way or catfight...
And a gentleman's agreement would be broken and "resolved" through the gentlemanly art of fisticuffs — in other words, it really hinges on mutual threat of violence rather than on mutual recognition of benefit?
How about we don't gender it at all? If what you want to say is that a particular agreement optimizes for mutual benefit and against various sorts of defection, just say so. We know some game theory around here; and we know that it is frequently applicable to the moral decisions of daily life. No need to drag (ha ha) gender into it at all.
No. The agreement is based on the mutual recognition of benefit. The expectation that each will honor the agreement if made relies on the threat of mutual violence. If there wasn't an expectation of benefit they would not enter into an agreement. (The agreement obliges them to either do something or experience negative consequences so if the agreement offered no expectation of benefit to compensate it would be a bad decision.)
I did not, and didn't realize that example was a cliche. I changed the example to be contrary to that expectation.