The doctor walks in, face ashen. “I’m sorry- it’s likely we’ll lose her or the baby. She’s unconscious now, and so the choice falls to you: should we try to save her or the child?”
The husband calmly replies, “Revoke!”
In non-story format: how do you formalize the difference between someone telling you bad news and someone causing you to be in a worse situation? How do you formalize the difference between accidental harm and intentional harm? How do you determine the value for having a particular resistance to blackmail, such that you can distinguish between blackmail you should and shouldn’t give in to?
How do you determine the value for having a particular resistance to blackmail, such that you can distinguish between blackmail you should and shouldn’t give in to?
The doctor has no obvious reason to prefer you to want to save your wife or your child. On the other hand, the mugger would very much prefer you to hand him your wallet than to accept to be killed, and so he’s deliberately making the latter possibility as unpleasant to you as possible to make you choose the former; but if you had precommitted to not choosing the former (e.g. by leaving your wallet at home) and he had known it, he wouldn’t have approached you in the first place.
IOW this is the decision tree:
mug give in
------------------------------------------------ (+50,-50)
| |
| | don't give in
| ---------------------- (-1,-1e6)
| don't mug
---------------------------------------------- (0, 0)
where the mugger makes the first choice, you make the second choices, and the numbers in parentheses are the pay-offs for the mugger and for you respectively. If you precommit not to choose the top branch, the mugger will take the bottom branch. (How do I stop multiple spaces from being collapsed into one?
The doctor walks in, face ashen. “I’m sorry- it’s likely we’ll lose her or the baby. She’s unconscious now, and so the choice falls to you: should we try to save her or the child?”
The husband calmly replies, “Revoke!”
An eloquent way of pointing out what I was missing. Thank you!
In non-story format: How do you formalize the difference between someone telling you bad information and someone causing you to be in a worse situation?
I will try to think on this more. The only thing that’s occurred to me so far is that if that it seems like if you have a formalization, it may not be a good idea to announce your formalization. Someone who knows your formalization might be able to exploit it by customizing their imposed worse situation to look like simply telling you bad information, their intentional harm to look like accidental harm, or their blackmail to extort the maximum amount of money out of you, if they had an explicit set of formal rules about where those boundaries were.
And for instance, it seems like a person would prefer it someone else blackmailed that person less than they could theoretically get away with because they were being cautious, rather than having every blackmailer immediately blackmail at maximum effective blackmail. (at that point, since the threshold can change)
Again, I really do appreciate you helping me focus my thoughts on this.
If I have a choice of whether or not to perform an action A, and I believe that performing A will harm agent X and will not in and of itself benefit me, and I credibly commit to performing A unless X provides me with some additional value V, I would consider myself to be threatening X with A unless they provide V. Whether that is a threat of blackmail or some other kind of threat doesn’t seem like a terribly interesting question.
Edit: my earlier thoughts on extortion/blackmail, specifically, here.
Did you ever see Shawshank Redemption? One of the Warden’s tricks is not just to take construction projects with convict labor, but to bid on any construction project (with the ability to undercut any competitor because his labor is already paid for) unless the other contractors paid him to stay away from that job.
My thought, as hinted at by my last question, is that refusing or accepting any particular blackmail request depends on the immediate and reputational costs of refusing or accepting. A flat “we will not accept any blackmail requests” is emotionally satisfying to deliver, but can’t be the right strategy for all situations. (When the hugger mugger demands “hug me or I’ll shoot!”, well, I’ll give him a hug.) A “we will not accept any blackmail requests that cost more than X” seems like the next best step, but as pointed out here that runs the risk of people just demanding X every time. Another refinement might be to publish a “acceptance function”- you’ll accept a (sufficiently credible and damaging) blackmail request for x with probability f(x), which is a decreasing (probably sigmoidal) function.
But the reputational costs of accepting or rejecting vary heavily based on the variety of threat, what you believe about potential threateners, whose opinions you care about, and so on. Things get very complex very fast.
If I am able to outbid all competitors for any job, but cannot do all jobs, and I let it be known that I won’t bid on jobs if bribed accordingly, I would not consider myself to be threatening all the other contractors, or blackmailing them. In effect this is a form of rent-seeking.
The acceptance-function approach you describe, where the severity and credibility of the threat matter, makes sense to me.
Blackmail seems to me to be a narrow variety of rent-seeking, and reasons for categorically opposing blackmail seem like reasons for categorically opposing rent-seeking. But I might be using too broad a category for ‘rent-seeking.’
reasons for categorically opposing blackmail seem like reasons for categorically opposing rent-seeking
Well, I agree, but only because in general the reasons for categorically opposing something that would otherwise seem rational to cooperate with are similar. That is, the strategy of being seen to credibly commit to a policy of never rewarding X, even when rewarding X would leave me better off, is useful whenever such a strategy reduces others’ incentive to X and where I prefer that people not X at me. It works just as well where X=rent-seeking as where X=giving me presents as where X=threatening me.
Yes but I’m not sure how valuable it is to. Basically, it boils down to ‘non-productive means of acquiring wealth,’ but it’s not clear if, say, petty theft should be included. (Generally, definitional choices like that there are made based on identity implications, rather than economic ones.) The general sentiment of things “I prefer that people not X at me” captures the essence better, perhaps.
There are benefits to insisting on a narrower definition: perhaps something like legal non-productive means of acquiring wealth, but part of the issue is that rent-seeking often operates by manipulating the definition of ‘legal.’
The doctor walks in, face ashen. “I’m sorry- it’s likely we’ll lose her or the baby. She’s unconscious now, and so the choice falls to you: should we try to save her or the child?”
The husband calmly replies, “Revoke!”
In non-story format: how do you formalize the difference between someone telling you bad news and someone causing you to be in a worse situation? How do you formalize the difference between accidental harm and intentional harm? How do you determine the value for having a particular resistance to blackmail, such that you can distinguish between blackmail you should and shouldn’t give in to?
The doctor has no obvious reason to prefer you to want to save your wife or your child. On the other hand, the mugger would very much prefer you to hand him your wallet than to accept to be killed, and so he’s deliberately making the latter possibility as unpleasant to you as possible to make you choose the former; but if you had precommitted to not choosing the former (e.g. by leaving your wallet at home) and he had known it, he wouldn’t have approached you in the first place.
IOW this is the decision tree:
where the mugger makes the first choice, you make the second choices, and the numbers in parentheses are the pay-offs for the mugger and for you respectively. If you precommit not to choose the top branch, the mugger will take the bottom branch. (How do I stop multiple spaces from being collapsed into one?
An eloquent way of pointing out what I was missing. Thank you!
I will try to think on this more. The only thing that’s occurred to me so far is that if that it seems like if you have a formalization, it may not be a good idea to announce your formalization. Someone who knows your formalization might be able to exploit it by customizing their imposed worse situation to look like simply telling you bad information, their intentional harm to look like accidental harm, or their blackmail to extort the maximum amount of money out of you, if they had an explicit set of formal rules about where those boundaries were.
And for instance, it seems like a person would prefer it someone else blackmailed that person less than they could theoretically get away with because they were being cautious, rather than having every blackmailer immediately blackmail at maximum effective blackmail. (at that point, since the threshold can change)
Again, I really do appreciate you helping me focus my thoughts on this.
If I have a choice of whether or not to perform an action A, and I believe that performing A will harm agent X and will not in and of itself benefit me, and I credibly commit to performing A unless X provides me with some additional value V, I would consider myself to be threatening X with A unless they provide V. Whether that is a threat of blackmail or some other kind of threat doesn’t seem like a terribly interesting question.
Edit: my earlier thoughts on extortion/blackmail, specifically, here.
Did you ever see Shawshank Redemption? One of the Warden’s tricks is not just to take construction projects with convict labor, but to bid on any construction project (with the ability to undercut any competitor because his labor is already paid for) unless the other contractors paid him to stay away from that job.
My thought, as hinted at by my last question, is that refusing or accepting any particular blackmail request depends on the immediate and reputational costs of refusing or accepting. A flat “we will not accept any blackmail requests” is emotionally satisfying to deliver, but can’t be the right strategy for all situations. (When the hugger mugger demands “hug me or I’ll shoot!”, well, I’ll give him a hug.) A “we will not accept any blackmail requests that cost more than X” seems like the next best step, but as pointed out here that runs the risk of people just demanding X every time. Another refinement might be to publish a “acceptance function”- you’ll accept a (sufficiently credible and damaging) blackmail request for x with probability f(x), which is a decreasing (probably sigmoidal) function.
But the reputational costs of accepting or rejecting vary heavily based on the variety of threat, what you believe about potential threateners, whose opinions you care about, and so on. Things get very complex very fast.
If I am able to outbid all competitors for any job, but cannot do all jobs, and I let it be known that I won’t bid on jobs if bribed accordingly, I would not consider myself to be threatening all the other contractors, or blackmailing them. In effect this is a form of rent-seeking.
The acceptance-function approach you describe, where the severity and credibility of the threat matter, makes sense to me.
Blackmail seems to me to be a narrow variety of rent-seeking, and reasons for categorically opposing blackmail seem like reasons for categorically opposing rent-seeking. But I might be using too broad a category for ‘rent-seeking.’
Well, I agree, but only because in general the reasons for categorically opposing something that would otherwise seem rational to cooperate with are similar. That is, the strategy of being seen to credibly commit to a policy of never rewarding X, even when rewarding X would leave me better off, is useful whenever such a strategy reduces others’ incentive to X and where I prefer that people not X at me. It works just as well where X=rent-seeking as where X=giving me presents as where X=threatening me.
Can you expand on your model if rent-seeking?
Yes but I’m not sure how valuable it is to. Basically, it boils down to ‘non-productive means of acquiring wealth,’ but it’s not clear if, say, petty theft should be included. (Generally, definitional choices like that there are made based on identity implications, rather than economic ones.) The general sentiment of things “I prefer that people not X at me” captures the essence better, perhaps.
There are benefits to insisting on a narrower definition: perhaps something like legal non-productive means of acquiring wealth, but part of the issue is that rent-seeking often operates by manipulating the definition of ‘legal.’