“breaking a promise” or “keeping a promise” has no intrinsic utilities here.
What I state is that under this formulation, if the other player believes your promise and plays the best response to your promise, your best response is to keep the promise.
What utility do you get from keeping the promise, and how does it outweigh an extra $1 from bidding $99 (and getting $101) instead of $100?
If you’re invoking Hofstadter’s super-rationality (the idea that your keeping a promise is causally linked to the other person keeping theirs), fine. If you’re acknowledging that you get outside-game utility from being a promise-keeper, also fine (but you’ve got a different payout structure than written). Otherwise, why are you giving up the $1?
And if you are willing to go $99 to get another $1 payout, why isn’t the other player (kind of an inverse super-rationality argument)?
My assumption is that promises are “vague”, playing $99 or $100 both fulfil the promise of giving a high claim close to $100, for which there is no incentive to break.
I think the vagueness stops the race to the bottom in TD, compared to the dollar auction in which every bid can be outmatched by a tiny step without risking going overboard immediately.
I do think I overcomplicated the matter to avoid modifying the payoff matrix.
“breaking a promise” or “keeping a promise” has no intrinsic utilities here.
What I state is that under this formulation, if the other player believes your promise and plays the best response to your promise, your best response is to keep the promise.
What utility do you get from keeping the promise, and how does it outweigh an extra $1 from bidding $99 (and getting $101) instead of $100?
If you’re invoking Hofstadter’s super-rationality (the idea that your keeping a promise is causally linked to the other person keeping theirs), fine. If you’re acknowledging that you get outside-game utility from being a promise-keeper, also fine (but you’ve got a different payout structure than written). Otherwise, why are you giving up the $1?
And if you are willing to go $99 to get another $1 payout, why isn’t the other player (kind of an inverse super-rationality argument)?
My assumption is that promises are “vague”, playing $99 or $100 both fulfil the promise of giving a high claim close to $100, for which there is no incentive to break.
I think the vagueness stops the race to the bottom in TD, compared to the dollar auction in which every bid can be outmatched by a tiny step without risking going overboard immediately.
I do think I overcomplicated the matter to avoid modifying the payoff matrix.