Ah, I think I see. The comfort/pleasantness aspect has a PD-like payoff (defecting saves effort, but hurts the other participant). I’d argue that the fact that D-C (you defect, opponent cooperates) is smaller payout for you than C-C (you both cooperate) makes most insights from PD not applicable here.
I do an annoying amount of interviewing and hiring for my employer (which I do not represent and for whom I do not speak), and while we do somewhat often miss on candidate experience simply due to scale and internal miscommunication, we STRONGLY expect that even for no-hire cases there will be future interactions with candidates (for different roles in our company and as the candidate grows over time), and with their friends/family/coworkers. This leads us to absolutely expect that interactions are repeatable rather than one-shot.
Candidates likewise often realize that even if they don’t get this job today, they may want to apply to a different or future opening. Also, people move around to different companies, so even if it’s a different employer, you might meet the same person. That probably doesn’t hold for extremely tiny employers for high-turnover low-skill positions, but each employment world is shockingly small, and reputation has more pathways than one might naively think.
Agreed with this to the point that I think hiring is a pretty excellent example of how interactions that look one-shot actually turn out to be iterated.
(I’m also not sure whether iterated PD is meant to refer to “repeated, and you explicitly have a reputation” vs “repeated, and even without reputation explicitly taken into account there are ramifications and selection pressures of what sort of strategies survive over the long term.” I was under the impression that the latter was included in the term)
I’d argue that the fact that D-C (you defect, opponent cooperates) is smaller payout for you than C-C (you both cooperate) makes most insights from PD not applicable here.
Oh, that’s a very good point! I had put the weight on the expected outcome of D-D, but nobody chooses the outcome they want, only the move that seems to have the best payoff. I will dedicate some time to adjusting my intuitions on this, because I suppose the next natural question is, if C-C is higher payout than D-C, why does it so often seem to end up that way?
Based on your experience, I guess this to vary heavily by industry; skilled labor and professions have a much smaller hiring/applicant pool, and often have communities set up around their work besides. By contrast, the number of hirers/applicants for unskilled labor is much larger, and there usually aren’t communities built up around it. On the other hand, I would also expect unskilled labor to be more closely tied to the actual physical communities in which people live, on both the hirer and applicant sides. On still a third hand, the job-related reputation seems fairly low priority in my physical community. Hmm.
I’m also reminded that the payoffs (or costs) aren’t equal in real-life games. It is a lot more effort to send “Thank you but we are moving forward with other candidates” emails to 99 people than it is to send “Thank you but I have accepted another offer” emails to 2 or 3 hirers. Also, the effort involved in correctly formatting applications and avoiding grammar/spelling errors is much higher for poorly educated people than it is for me.
But the immediate takeaway is, I gotta shift my focus from D-D outcome to D-C move at the intuition level.
Ah, I think I see. The comfort/pleasantness aspect has a PD-like payoff (defecting saves effort, but hurts the other participant). I’d argue that the fact that D-C (you defect, opponent cooperates) is smaller payout for you than C-C (you both cooperate) makes most insights from PD not applicable here.
I do an annoying amount of interviewing and hiring for my employer (which I do not represent and for whom I do not speak), and while we do somewhat often miss on candidate experience simply due to scale and internal miscommunication, we STRONGLY expect that even for no-hire cases there will be future interactions with candidates (for different roles in our company and as the candidate grows over time), and with their friends/family/coworkers. This leads us to absolutely expect that interactions are repeatable rather than one-shot.
Candidates likewise often realize that even if they don’t get this job today, they may want to apply to a different or future opening. Also, people move around to different companies, so even if it’s a different employer, you might meet the same person. That probably doesn’t hold for extremely tiny employers for high-turnover low-skill positions, but each employment world is shockingly small, and reputation has more pathways than one might naively think.
Agreed with this to the point that I think hiring is a pretty excellent example of how interactions that look one-shot actually turn out to be iterated.
(I’m also not sure whether iterated PD is meant to refer to “repeated, and you explicitly have a reputation” vs “repeated, and even without reputation explicitly taken into account there are ramifications and selection pressures of what sort of strategies survive over the long term.” I was under the impression that the latter was included in the term)
Oh, that’s a very good point! I had put the weight on the expected outcome of D-D, but nobody chooses the outcome they want, only the move that seems to have the best payoff. I will dedicate some time to adjusting my intuitions on this, because I suppose the next natural question is, if C-C is higher payout than D-C, why does it so often seem to end up that way?
Based on your experience, I guess this to vary heavily by industry; skilled labor and professions have a much smaller hiring/applicant pool, and often have communities set up around their work besides. By contrast, the number of hirers/applicants for unskilled labor is much larger, and there usually aren’t communities built up around it. On the other hand, I would also expect unskilled labor to be more closely tied to the actual physical communities in which people live, on both the hirer and applicant sides. On still a third hand, the job-related reputation seems fairly low priority in my physical community. Hmm.
I’m also reminded that the payoffs (or costs) aren’t equal in real-life games. It is a lot more effort to send “Thank you but we are moving forward with other candidates” emails to 99 people than it is to send “Thank you but I have accepted another offer” emails to 2 or 3 hirers. Also, the effort involved in correctly formatting applications and avoiding grammar/spelling errors is much higher for poorly educated people than it is for me.
But the immediate takeaway is, I gotta shift my focus from D-D outcome to D-C move at the intuition level.