Good point; haggling is a good example of a fuzzy boundary between threats and trade.
If A is willing to sell a widget for any price above $10, and B is willing to buy a widget for any price below $20, and there are no other buyers or sellers, then for any price X strictly between $10 and $20, A saying "I won't sell for less than X" and B saying "I won't sell for more than X" are both threats under my model.
Which means that agents that "naively" precommit to never respond to any threats (the way I understand them) will not reach an agreement when haggling. They'll also fail at the Ultimatum game.
So there needs to be a better model for threats, possibly one that takes shelling points into account; or maybe there should be a special category for "the kind of threats it's beneficial to precommit to ignore".
Hmm the pre-commitment to ignore would depend on other agents and their pre-pre-commitment to ignore pre-commitments. It just goes recursive like Sherlock Holmes vs Moriarty, and when you go meta and try to look for 'limit' of recursion, it goes recursive again... i have a feeling that it is inherently a rock-paper-skissors situation where you can't cheat like this robot. (I.e. I would suggest, at that point, to try to make a bunch of proofs of impossibility to narrow expectations down somewhat).
From the last thread:
Meta: