Cofounder of Beeminder
dreeves
Karma: 635
Hi from the future [1]! Beeminder has a version of this built in: the one-week akrasia horizon. You can change anything about a Beeminder goal, including ending it, at any time, but the change doesn’t take effect for a week. As Katja Grace once said on Overcoming Bias: “[you] can’t change it out of laziness unless you are particularly forward thinking about your laziness (in which case you probably won’t sign up for this).”
[1] I’m mildly terrified that it’s against the norms to reply to something this old. I’ve been thinking hard about your (Scott’s) recent ACX post, “Towards A Bayesian Theory Of Willpower,” and am digging up all your previous thoughts on the topic, so here I am.
Good thought experiment! I replied in the form of another Yudkowsky vignette. :)
Summary: “Infinity” is a perfectly coherent Cheerful Price for, say, something sufficiently repugnant to you or something very unethical. (But also you must have a finite Cheerful Price for anything, no matter how bad, if the badness happens with sufficiently small probability.)
That reminds me of this delightful and hilarious (edit: and true!) thing Eliezer said once:
Let me try to clear up the notion that economically rational agents must be cold, heartless creatures who put a money price on everything.
There doesn’t have to be a financial price you’d accept to kill every sentient being on Earth except you. There doesn’t even have to be a price you’d accept to kill your spouse. It’s allowed to be the case that there are limits to the total utility you know how to generate by spending currency, and for anything more valuable to you than that, you won’t exchange it for a trillion dollars.
Now, it *does* have to be the case for a von Neumann-Morgenstern rational agent that if a sum of money has any value to you at all, you will exchange anything else you have—or any possible event you can bring about -- *at some probability* for that sum of money. So it *is* true that as a rational agent, there is some *probability* of killing your spouse, yourself, or the entire human species that you will cheerfully exchange for $50.
I hope that clears up exactly what sort of heartless creatures economically rational agents are.
Interesting! It hadn’t occurred to me that this could be read as any kind of repudiation of “shut up and multiply”. My previous comment on this post takes a stab at reconciling Cheerful Prices with my own extreme shut-up-and-multiply way of thinking.
Oh my goodness I love this. I’m actually so philosophically on board that I’m confused about treating Cheerful Prices as single real numbers. In my homo-economicus worldview, there exists a single price at which I’m exactly indifferent and then my cheerfulness goes up smoothly/continuously from there. It feels very arbitrary to pick something on that continuum and call it “the” cheerful price I have.
(My answer is to turn the nerdery up to 11 and compute a Shapley value, etc etc, but let me save that for another time or place. Jacob Falkovich and I have been talking about jointly blogging about this. We’ll definitely want to tie it in to the concept of Cheerful Prices if we do!)
Translated into this delightful new language of Cheerful Prices, the rough version of my approach is like so:
I as the buyer name my lowest possible Cheerful Price (where I just barely find it worth it) and you as the seller name your highest possible Cheerful Price (above which it’s just not worth it to you) and we settle on the mean of those two.
But maybe the point of Cheerful Prices is to simplify that. Let one person on one side of the trade make a guess about the consumer surplus and name something in that range. I.e., by naming my Cheerful Price I’m saying that at that price I’d be getting a big enough chunk of the consumer surplus that I don’t need to know the size of your chunk. If you, as my counterparty, feel the same then we’re golden.
Really good points. It’s funny, I have a draft of a similar point about personal behavior change that I tried to make as provocative-sounding as possible:
http://doc.dreev.es/carbonfoot (Trying To Limit Your Personal Carbon Footprint Hurts The Environment)
But note the PS where I suggest a counterargument: making personal sacrifices for climate change may shape your identity, drive you to greater activism, and make your activism and climate evangelism more persuasive (to those who don’t appreciate the economics and game theory of it).
Nice! I’ve heard a similar idea called a “talent stack” or “skill stack” but explaining it in terms of staking out a chunk of the Pareto frontier is much better.
Coincidentally, I just wrote a post explaining the idea of Pareto dominance—http://blog.beeminder.com/pareto—in case that’s useful to anyone.
Now resurrected!
Thank you! See above (“Better to not have people feel like their desperation is being capitalized on.”) for my response to your first question. And we actually believe that our system is, in practice if not in theory, strategy-proof. It’s explicitly ok to game the system to our hearts’ delight. It seems to be quite robust to that. Our utilities tend to either be uncannily well-matched, in which case it’s kind of a coin flip who wins, or they’re wildly different, but we never seem to have enough certainty about how different they’ll be for it to be fruitful to distort our bids much.
The strategy of “just say a number such that you’re torn about whether you’d rather win or lose” seems to be close enough to optimal.
How about adding a tiny bit of ambiguity (or evasion of the direct question) and making up for it with more effusiveness, eg, “it’s not only my job but it feels really good to know that I’m helping you so I really want you to bug me about even trivial-seeming things!” All true and all she’s omitting is her immediate annoyance but that is truly secondary, as she points out below about first-order vs second-order desires.
Yes, we’re super keen to make sure the efficient thing happens regardless of the initial distribution of resources/responsibilities/property-rights/etc. And we use yootling as a bargaining mechanism to make that happen. In general we’re always willing to shove work to each other or redistribute resources as efficiency dictates, using payments to make that always be fair.
In practice the sealed-bid version seems to be ungameable, at least for us! None of the problems you mentioned have arisen. My parents have tried this and had more problems but as far as I could tell it always involved contention about what to consider to be joint 50⁄50 decisions. Bethany and I seem to have no problem with that, using the heuristic of “when in doubt, just call it a 50⁄50 decision and yootle for it”.
Fixed and fixed. Thank you!
I’m impressed! That’s kind of the conclusion we gradually came to as well, after a lot of trial and error. Better to not have people feel like their desperation is being capitalized on.
Another way to put it: when you’re really desperate to win a particular auction it’s really nice to be able to just say so honestly, with a crazy high bid. Trying to allocate the surplus equitably means that I have to carefully strategize on understating my desperation. (And worst of all, a mistake means a highly inefficient outcome!)
PS: To be clear about first-price vs second-price, it’s technically neither since there’s no distinct seller.
Here’s the n-player, arbitrary shares version:
Each participant starts with some share of the decision. Everyone submits a sealed bid, the second-highest of which is taken to be the Fair Market Price (FMP). The high bidder wins, and buys out everyone else’s shares, ie, pays them the appropriate fraction of the FMP.
“Even yootling”, or just “yootling”, refers to the special case of two players and 50⁄50 shares. In that case, instead of bidding a fair market price (FMP), you say how much you’re willing to pay if you win. True FMP is twice that, since you only have to pay half of FMP with even yootling. So instead of deciding what you’d pay, doubling it to get FMP, then halving FMP to get the actual payment, we short circuit that and you just say the payment as your bid. For yootling with uneven shares it’s easier to bid FMP and then pay the appropriate fraction of that.
Bethany and I philosophically bite the bullet on this, which is basically to just agree with your second point: the wealthy person gets their way all the time and the poor person gets what’s to them a lot of money and everyone is happy.
If that’s unpalatable or feels unfair then I think the principled solution is for the wealthy person to simply redress the unfairness with a lump sum payment to redistribute the wealth.
I don’t think it’s reasonable—ignoring all the psychology and social intricacies, as I’m wont to do [1] -- to object both to auctions with disparate wealth and to lump sum redistribution to achieve fairness.
Now that I’m introspecting, I suppose it’s the case that Bethany and I tend to seize excuses to redistribute wealth, but they have to be plausible ones.
You’re right that it’s similar to a Vickrey auction in that the 2nd highest bid (in the 2-player case) is used as the price, but it’s different in that there’s no 3rd-party seller. The good is jointly owned and the payment will go from one player to the other. In particular, yootling is not strictly incentive compatible like Vickrey is (though in practice it seems to be close enough).
Thanks for the pointer to Landsburg! Looks like he worked out a way (by enlisting another economist couple) to have meaningful auctions despite having joint money with his spouse. I predict that system didn’t hold together though. I should email him!
Specifically, here’s the little add-on for Loqi that conducts auctions: https://github.com/aaronpk/zenircbot-bid
Agreed, we just haven’t gotten to that yet. The auctioneer chatroom bot is pretty new.
Upvoted for the delightfully flattering implication for my and Bethany’s relationship. :)
But, yes, a prerequisite is that everyone think like an economist, where everything you care about can be assigned a dollar value.
See also the core assumptions at the top of Bethany’s article [http://messymatters.com/autonomy].
Correction to the Ainslie link: http://picoeconomics.org/breakdown.htm