I would hope that our legal system would want to avoid sending an innocent man to prison at all costs and release me, free of all charges.

It’s obviously still an issue for anyone plotting the usefulness of this strategy elsewhere, but it wouldn’t have been a factor for these two.

You’re missing it… He didn’t commit to stealing. He just convinced the OTHER guy he was committed to stealing, knowing he was going to split all along.

He set up a situation where either A) both would get something if the bald guy just acted rationally (if you KNOW the other guy’s taking steal, you might as well chance he’s an honest guy and give you something later) or B) make the bald guy feel so bad about wiping BOTH of their chances by taking steal, that he would give back half the money anyway!

Radley’s right. This was masterful.

Yeah, but you had to look it up to figure that out, douchebag.

Why is it doomed? Sure you have to pay taxes, but you still get something. Getting something and paying taxes on it still beats getting nothing which is what would’ve happened if the bald guy chose to steal (and the whole point of this strategy was to deter the bald guy from stealing).

Just like the Prisoner’s dilemma… optimal choice is to always steal.

Actually, in game theory terms, the decision to always steal leads to the Nash equilibrium, but that is not the same as the Pareto optimum. The Pareto optimum in this game is to both split.

Moderately-Hairy Player’s strategy was certainly interesting and entertaining and in choosing split you could certainly argue he was making a moral decision to share. However stealing and just taking the money wouldn’t have been immoral in this context at all.

First, you have to not the short time frame the guy has in which to read his opponent and act. Even if he’s pretty certain that he’s bullied the guy into choosing SPLIT, he can’t be 100% sure, and there is ample evidence to suggest that he’s pissed the guy off. The guy might be willing to STEAL out of spite just to punish the immorality that he sees in the guys actions. In fact, I have a hard time thinking of any other reason the bald guy would choose STEAL given the convincing disposition of the first.

Now, you might suggest that this outcome is a loss for the hirsute gentleman, but I would submit that it still is better than a STEAL-STEAL outcome. Given that the only reason the bald guy should STEAL is if out of moral opposition to the guys expressed tactics, the result is then a windfall in the eyes of the winner who would likely be receptive to sharing at least a portion of the proceeds with the guy who ultimately made what the bald guy clearly has expressed he views as the moral choice.

As for your valuation of choosing to SPLIT, I haven’t seen the entire episode, but I imagine both of these guys are identified by name, hometown and occupation at some point, if not repeatedly throughout. Depending on the rarity of the name, size of the hometown, and reputation of the occupation, the cost of being a complete bully on national television shouldn’t be discounted.

There are literally 0 videos like this of the show. The reason this is an interesting video is because of its unique strategy. The uniqueness does not depend in any way on the non-bald guy ending up choosing to split; it has to do with the non-bald guy committing to stealing in order to affect the behavior of his opponent.

Morality is relevant as far as the contestants value it. If non-bald values the other guy getting some money more than he values the money himself, then he acted correctly. But this is a game show–the entire point is to compete with other contestants and be smarter than them in order to win money for yourself rather than allow them to win money. If non-bald were literally stealing money, in my personal opinion morality would be more important. But in this case, where it can hardly be argued that it is “bad” to “steal,” I don’t think non-bald guy should have valued morality as he did. But of course, that is his decision to make.

That word is “hirsute.”

That is all.

First of all you missed the intent of the post. There’s a million clips of people burning their opponents in game shows like this. Buried amidst all that noise, Radley found one interesting variation. Your response was to immediately complain that this clip didn’t turn out like all the others. The things you didn’t like about the outcome here, were the only things that made it worthy of note.

But the real folly is that you now insist moral considerations should be excluded from the discussion. Why? Nick the non-bald player, evidently wanted to test a moral hypothesis, by discovering whether it was possible to compel someone into a cooperative solution. He did that, but because you didn’t like him doing it, you simply announce that morality should be irrelevant to the question of strategy.

But Alex, my droog, morality was the object of this stratagem. How can you possibly judge it apart from that?

Declare it as a business expense.

Just like the Prisoner’s dilemma… optimal choice is to always steal.

I’ve often thought that an enterprising contestant could propose to the other contestants, before the taping begins, that if there is an opportunity during Final Jeopardy to wager an amount that generates a tie, then he/she will do so on the condition that the beneficiary of the wager splits the winnings with the leader. Should be a no brainer since the trailing contestant would have another go at it the next day and a chance to win then. Also shouldn’t matter much to the leader who they face, unless they think their competition might be weaker the next day … no way to really know that.

Ah, no… in casual social situations, “where what goes around” is potentially able to “come back around”, the best policy is decency and charity. That’s why otherwise deadly single-encounter policies like forgiveness, charity, mercy, and magnanimity manage to survive as social behaviors.

You need to look up the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (IPD) on wikipedia or somewhere else.

As it turns out, Gandhi was wrong — his exclamation, “an Eye for an Eye only makes the whole world blind!” is patently wrong, and this bit of Game Theory (IPD) applied to the real world shows it.

“An Eye for an Eye, with forgiveness” is built into the way the universe works. So the original Jewish maxim, tempered with Christian charity, is in the design of the universe. That may not be a Sign from God, but it does say which religion is closest to “Truth” when it comes to human behavior…

The biggest problem with this gameshow is that it’s a single-encounter situation… so the iterated aspect of the PD isn’t really applicable. So the pure, dismal, PD rules apply, and you should work to screw your opposition over.

LOL, and why is this? Us Yanks don’t use the term “bollocks” — 90% of us wouldn’t have a clue what it meant.