Hmm. There are probably at least 3 things involved in the low score low effort issue.
1). Energy returned on energy invested. Effort is energy, if you can’t make appreciably more energy (or things that can be converted into energy) by expending your energy for the organisation, you may as well save your energy.
2). Other opportunities: In the real world there is often other ways of getting score/energy so you should use your effort to do those rather than things with a poor pay off.
3) Other players in different organisations: Even if the game is the only opportunity available to you, you still may be competing against people playing different games with different payoffs. Take buying a house for example (the biggest relative pricing issue people generally face), even if you are a dictator in an organisation with a small score you may still not be able to buy a house if you are competing in the same market as communist in an organisation with a very large score. So the dictator might not be motivated to expend all his effort if it still can’t get his dream house.
Ignoring EROEI, perhaps proportion of total score (of every player) might be better as the input. This brings back the difficulties of the feedback loop though.
I’ll think about different testing methods over dinner.
I was thinking about modeling effort as negative utility, and reward as positive utility, but that only works to model rational agents that share those assumptions.
Hmm. There are probably at least 3 things involved in the low score low effort issue.
1). Energy returned on energy invested. Effort is energy, if you can’t make appreciably more energy (or things that can be converted into energy) by expending your energy for the organisation, you may as well save your energy.
2). Other opportunities: In the real world there is often other ways of getting score/energy so you should use your effort to do those rather than things with a poor pay off.
3) Other players in different organisations: Even if the game is the only opportunity available to you, you still may be competing against people playing different games with different payoffs. Take buying a house for example (the biggest relative pricing issue people generally face), even if you are a dictator in an organisation with a small score you may still not be able to buy a house if you are competing in the same market as communist in an organisation with a very large score. So the dictator might not be motivated to expend all his effort if it still can’t get his dream house.
Ignoring EROEI, perhaps proportion of total score (of every player) might be better as the input. This brings back the difficulties of the feedback loop though.
I’ll think about different testing methods over dinner.
I was thinking about modeling effort as negative utility, and reward as positive utility, but that only works to model rational agents that share those assumptions.