In reality I’m not sure the trap would remain effective for long enough for too many of those to start turning up. Humans aren’t rigidly CDTish. They’ll catch on. Perhaps many professional traders already have some principle against playing games of collective chicken.
I guess a good question here is… is the opportunity cost of assessing the failure rate, to the level of accuracy where the risk of project success is low enough that you can be sure that you’ll get your refund bonus, actually lower than the refund bonus. I think it has to be proportionate to it! I’d guess that earnest pledger’s work, figuring out whether the project is good, would be roughly equally to the exploitative pledger’s work of figuring out whether the project will succeed. But I think the answer is no. For the exploitative pledger, success is a risk, for the earnest pledger, success is a boon, the earnest pledger doesn’t need the refund bonus to be so high to justify their time investment because they don’t have that risk to offset, so the refund bonus will be too low to justify the work for most exploitative pledgers.
So in most cases the refund bonus extraction game wont be profitable. But that doesn’t mean it’ll be unprofitable in all cases. Sometimes the analysis will be especially easy (the product will be clearly useless). And sometimes one extractor’s analysis will leak, and others will imitate them (creating a very dangerous game for them all), or, oh, one extractor will pledge multiple times with alts ..
In reality I’m not sure the trap would remain effective for long enough for too many of those to start turning up. Humans aren’t rigidly CDTish. They’ll catch on. Perhaps many professional traders already have some principle against playing games of collective chicken.
I guess a good question here is… is the opportunity cost of assessing the failure rate, to the level of accuracy where the risk of project success is low enough that you can be sure that you’ll get your refund bonus, actually lower than the refund bonus. I think it has to be proportionate to it! I’d guess that earnest pledger’s work, figuring out whether the project is good, would be roughly equally to the exploitative pledger’s work of figuring out whether the project will succeed. But I think the answer is no. For the exploitative pledger, success is a risk, for the earnest pledger, success is a boon, the earnest pledger doesn’t need the refund bonus to be so high to justify their time investment because they don’t have that risk to offset, so the refund bonus will be too low to justify the work for most exploitative pledgers.
So in most cases the refund bonus extraction game wont be profitable. But that doesn’t mean it’ll be unprofitable in all cases. Sometimes the analysis will be especially easy (the product will be clearly useless). And sometimes one extractor’s analysis will leak, and others will imitate them (creating a very dangerous game for them all), or, oh, one extractor will pledge multiple times with alts ..