Metadata
- Author: Archive
- Full Title:: “The Traitors”, a Reality TV Show, Offers a Useful Economics Lesson
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- Document Tags:: Reality Tv, Reality Tv,
- URL:: https://archive.is/ln3I5
- Read date:: 2025-01-23
Highlights
In game-theoretic terms, the show is a finite, sequential, incomplete information game, meaning it has an end, occurs in stages and players are kept in the dark about some things. (View Highlight)
It is a variant of a game known as “Mafia”, which was invented in 1986 by Dimitry Davidoff, a psychology student at Moscow State University and secondary-school teacher on the side. Mr Davidoff invented the game for his pupils, hoping to demonstrate that an “informed minority” would triumph over an “uninformed majority”. (View Highlight)
The game spread by word of mouth until, in America, it was given gothic trappings of werewolves and villagers, rather than mafiosi, and became a staple at events in Silicon Valley. (View Highlight)
As the game is finite—it is not repeated—there is no opportunity to learn any “tells”. (View Highlight)
There is also no chance for the more valuable kind of communication known as signalling. When signalling, a player takes a costly action in order to tell another player something. Some see a university education as an example of this: it costs cleverer and more conscientious types less to get a degree than stupider and lazier ones, allowing employers to distinguish between the two. (View Highlight)
Rational self-interest would suggest both faithfuls and traitors should turn on their allies in the final round: fewer to split the pot between. (View Highlight)
A rational traitor should want to ensure this final trio consists of people who trust them. Yet that should lead any faithful to conclude that they have been kept in the game because they trust a traitor and have benefited from his or her protection. As a result, they should betray this person. The perfect Bayesian equilibrium, according to those who have studied Mafia, is voting randomly according to a pre-set public rule. Ensuring the rule is known to all players means that traitors who deviate and “just by chance” use their extra information to vote out only faithfuls are identified as doing so. (View Highlight)
Fortunately for television producers, contestants are not perfectly rational. Colin Camerer of the California Institute of Technology suggests that most players in actual games demonstrate “bounded rationality”, believing their strategy to be the most savvy, and responding to what they think less sophisticated players are doing. (View Highlight)