at the cost of determinism
And market efficiency.
Plus, I think it doesn't work when there are only two players? If I honestly bid $30, and you bid $40 and randomly get awarded the auction, then I have to pay you $40. And that leaves me at -$10 disutility, since the task was only -$30 to me.
To be sure I'm following you: If the 2nd bidder gets it (for the same price as the first bidder), the market efficiency is lost because the 2nd person is indifferent between winning and not, while the first would have liked to win it? If so, I think that's right.
If there are two players... I agree the first bidder is worse off than they would be if they had won. This seems like a special case of the above though: why is it more broken with 2 players?
if you bid lower and therefore win the auction, then you have to do the chore for less than you value it at. That's no fun.
You only do this when you plan to be the buyer. The idea is to win the auction and become the buyer, but putting up as little money as possible. If you know that the other guy will do it for $5, you bid $6, even if you actually value it at $10. As you said, I'm talking about bid sniping.
But if other people bid high, then you have to pay more.
Ah, I should have written "broadcast that you find all labor extra unpleasant and all goods extra valuable when you are the seller (giving up a good or doing a labour) so that people pay you more to do it."
If you're willing to do a chore for _$10, but you broadcast that you find it more than -$10 of unpleasantness, the other party will be influenced to bid higher - say, $40. Then, you can bid $30, and get paid more. It's just price inflation - in a traditional transaction, a seller wants the buyer to pay as much as they are willing to pay. To do this, the seller must artificially inflate the buyer's perception of how much the item is worth to the seller. The same holds true here.
When you intend to be the buyer you do the opposite - broadcast that you're willing to do the labor for cheap to lower prices, then bid snipe. As in a traditional transaction, the buyer wants the seller to believe that the item is not of much worth to the buyer. The buyer also has to try to guess the minimum amount that the seller will part with the item.
it actually gives the lowest bidder, not their actual bid, but the second lowest bid minus 1
So what I wrote above was assuming the price was a midpoint between the buyer's and seller's bid, which gives them both equal power to set the price. This rule slightly alters things, by putting all the price setting power in the buyer's hands.
Under this rule, after all the deceptive price inflation is said and done you should still bid an honest $10 if you are only playing once - though since this is an iterated case, you probably want to bid higher just to keep up appearances if you are trying to be deceptive.
One of the nice things about this rule is that there is no incentive to be deceptive unless other people are bid sniping. The weakness of this rule is that it creates a stronger incentive to bid snipe.
Price inflation (seller's strategy) and bid sniping (buyer's strategy) are the two basic forms of deception in this game. Your rule empowers the buyer to set the price, thereby making price inflation harder at the cost of making bid sniping easier. I don't think there is a way around this - it seems to be a general property of trading. Finding a way around it would probably solve some larger scale economic problems.
(I'm one of the other users/devs of Choron)
There are two ways I know of that the market can try to defeat bid sniping, and one way a bidder can (that I know of).
Our system does not display the lowest bid, only the second lowest bid. For a one-shot auction where you had poor information about the others preferences, this would solve bid sniping. However, in our case, chores come up multiple times, and I'm pretty sure that it's public knowledge how much I bid on shopping, for example.
If you're in a situation where the lowest bid is hidden, but your bidding is predictable, you can sometimes bid higher than you normally would. This punishes people who bid less than they're willing to actually do the chore for, but imposes costs on you and the market as a whole as well, in the form of higher prices for the chore.
A third option, which we do not implement (credit to Richard for this idea), is to randomly award the auction to one of the two (or n) lowest bidders, with probability inversely related to their bid. In particular, if you pick between the lowest 2 bidders, both have claimed to be willing to do the job for the 2nd bidder's price (so the price isn't higher and noone can claim they were forced to do something for less than they wanted). This punishes bid-snipers by taking them at their word that they're willing to do the chore for the reduced price, at the cost of determinism, which allows better planning.
I wasn't thanks. I'll try to read that sometime when I get a chance. At first glance though, I'm unsure why you would want it to be logarithmic. I thought about doing it that way too, but you then you lose the meaning associated with average error, which I think is undesirable.
So, let's say you want a scoring rule with two properties.
You want it to be local: that is to say, all that matters is the probability you assigned to the actual outcome. This is in contrast to rules like the quadratic scoring rule, where your score is different depending on how the outcomes that didn't happen are grouped. Based on this assumption, I'm going to write the scoring rule as S(p), where S(p) is the score you get when you assign a probability p to the true outcome.
You also want it to play nicely with combining separate events. That is to say, if you estimate 10% of it being cloudy when it actually is, and 10% of it being warm outside when it actually is, you want your score to be the same as if you had assigned 1% to the correct proposition that it is warm and cloudy outside. More succinctly: S(p)+S(q)=S(pq).
If you add in the additional caveat that some scores are not 0, then you are forced by the above statement to a logarithmic scoring rule. Interestingly, you don't need to include the requirement that it be a proper scoring rule, although the logarithmic scoring rule is proper.
Actually, it seems the convention ends relatively early on Sunday, so I might be able to make it after all (it's, what, a one hour train ride between cities?). Then again, I might not. I note that you seem to be the organizer for the DC meetups going by your post history. Is it permissible to maybe-show-maybe-not-who-knows?
By all means forward it to the DC list, and thanks. Given the apparent popularity of anime around here, I would be surprised if no one on it was planning on being at the con themselves.
I'm going to be in Baltimore this weekend for an anime convention. I expect to have a day or so's leeway coming back. Is there a LW group nearby I might drop in on?
I've never been to a meetup, but it seems likely there is one in that area; I see one in DC but it's meeting on the last day of the con. The LWSH experience has left me more interested in seeing people face to face.
Sorry you can't make it out to DC. AFAIK there's no baltimore meetup. However! We've had people come from baltimore before. I'll forward this to the DC list and see if anyone from there is free.
Granted, but do you really think that they're going to be so incredibly tasty that the value people gain from eating babies over not eating babies outweighs the loss of all the future experiences of the babies?
To link that back to the marginal cases argument, which I believe - correct me if I'm wrong - you were responding to: Do you think that meat diets are just that much more tasty than vegetarian diets that the utility gained for human society outweighs the suffering and death of the animals? (Which may not be the only consideration, but I think at this point - may be wrong - you'd admit isn't nothing.) If so, have you made an honest attempt to test this assumption for yourself by, for instance, getting a bunch of highly rated veg recipes and trying to be vegetarian for a month or so?
If you're considering opening a baby farm, not opening the baby farm doesn't mean the babies get to live fulfilling lives: it means they don't get to exist, so that point is moot.
The fundamental constants alone are going to consume ~20-30 bits each.
Not if those constants are free variables, or can computed in some way we don't understand. Frankly, I'd find it a bit ugly if those constants were hard-coded into the fabric of the universe.
Well, several of the universal constants arguably define our units. For every base type of physical quantity (things like distance, time, temperature, and mass, but not, for example, speed, which can be constructed out of distance and time), you can set a physical constant to 1 if you're willing to change how you measure that property. For example, you can express distance in terms of time (measuring distance in light-seconds or light-years). By doing so, you can discard the speed of light: set it to 1. Speeds are now ratios of time to time: something moving at 30% the speed of light would move 0.3 (light) seconds per second: their speed would be the dimensionless quantity 0.3. You can drop many other physical constants in this fashion: Offhead, the speed of light, the gravitational constant, planks constant, the coulomb constant, and the Boltzmann constant can all be set to 1 without any trouble, and therefore don't count against your complexity budget.
Harry can do partial transfiguration.
Ahh. That does seem like it might work.
Why wait for Dumbledore? Isn't Harry still inexplicably allowed to carry his with a completely ineffectual device preventing him from using it unauthorized?
Ineffectual only if Quirrell helps, right?
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Yes, that's one of the inefficiencies. The other inefficiency is that whenever the 2nd player wins, the service gets more expensive.
Because of the fact that the service gets more expensive. When there are multiple players, this might not seem like such a big deal - sure, you might pay more than the cheapest possible price, but you are still ultimately all benefiting (even if you aren't maximally benefiting). Small market inefficiencies are tolerable.
It's not so bad with 3 players who bid 20, 30, 40, since even if the 30-bidder wins, the other two players only have to pay 15 each. It's still inefficient, but it's not worse than no trade.
However, when your economy consists of two people, market inefficiency is felt more keenly. Consider the example I gave earlier once more:
I bid 30. You bid 40. So I can sell you my service for $30-$40, and we both benefit. . But wait! The coin flip makes you win the auction. So now I have to pay you $40.
My stated preference is that I would not be willing to pay more than $30 for this service. But I am forced to do so. The market inefficiency has not merely resulted in a sub-optimal outcome - it's actually worse than if I had not traded at all!
Edit: What's worse is that you can name any price. So suppose it's just us two, I bid $10 and you bid $100, and it goes to the second bidder...
I don't think that the service gets more expensive under a second price auction (which Choron uses). If you bid $10 and I bid $100, normally it would go to you for $100. In the randomized case, it might go to me for $100.
I think I agree with you about the possibility of harm in the 2 person case.