The Big Why Question

The big why question I am talking about is - why we are the way we are? In fact, that's the question V. Raghunathan's book, Games Indians Play: Why We Are the Way We Are, tries to understand. As the title suggests, the authors tries to answer the 'why' question through a game theoretical perspective. Specifically, he does it by modelling many of our day to day interactions in terms of prisoner's dilemma (PD). And, as you might know, the only equilibrium that two rational people reach in a one shot PD is defect-defect. That is, neither cooperates. The book does not offer anything frightfully new to someone who is familiar with PD and its possibilities. Nonetheless, the book is a welcome and useful approach to understanding India's problems: a lot of times India's problems are stated at very abstract levels; trying to understand them in terms of economics presents a more concrete model.

It does seem that non-cooperation has stabilised in India. In fact, this is quite the antithesis of another book I read recently, The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod, wherein Axelrod argues how simple, natural and inevitable cooperation is. Raghunathan suggests that most of the non-cooperative bahaviour that exists in India is because the games we play mostly remain one shot PDs and do not progress into becoming Iterated Prisoner's Dilemmas (IPDs). In this post I'd like to explore this point a little bit. I welcome inputs.

So, the problem is not that we Indians play games. It is that we don't play them enough. Or that our games do not become repeated games involving the same small set of players. Why is it that we don't play repeated games? The obvious first answer is that our urban populations are enormous, thus presenting a potentially unlimited supply of random players to chose from. As a result, two (uniformly) randomly chosen players feel it mighty safe to defect and move on. Owing to the huge sample space, the probability of meeting the same player in the near future is small. Thus, there is no incentive to cooperate in view of future gains. The best example of this is our traffic, where everyone is out there to compete and get ahead (albeit, marginally). If only the commuters could see beyond the 2-feet of as yet unoccupied road, and cooperate with each other, traffic would be smoother, safer and more efficient for everyone. But the commuters work under no guarantees; and everyone around is a stranger without any history of interaction; so why bother?

But is that all? Not really. Even in situations that are repeated, somehow cooperation does not evolve. Let's take a real example. My mom had a domestic help who used to "complete" all the work she was responsible for in a jiffy. My mom complained every day about how carelessly the domestic help worked, and who she has to literally redo everything once the help left. Further, she used to remain absent for extended periods of time regularly, without even informing ahead of time. I suggested that mom could get a different person and relieve the present one. But she presented two difficulties: no one else in the locality would do the job for the amount the present one does it for, they all take at least twice as much; and secondly, the present one is an old woman, and it's not nice to ask her to leave. I argued that it doesn't make sense to pay lesser (or pay at all) if the work cannot be delegated. I also suggested that may be mom could raise the present help's wages. Perhaps she will do the job better. That way it will help both. Mom wasn't ready to accept that. It's all the same; it doesn't matter how much more you give; no point in wasting money.

I think a lot of our interactions follow this model. Two things here: (1) Cooperation seems a huge risk to us. We feel that, in the absence of guarantees, if we are the first ones to cooperate, it will likely lead to personal loss and embarrassment. (2) We fail to work out a punishment model when the other player defects. We are happier to defect right at the beginning. To add to this, we are either not easily provoked in the face of defection against us, or we don't know what to do when provoked, thus preferring not to get into such a situation at all.

Rather than adopting a straightforward Tit-for-Tat, we generally work out a complex balancing act not necessarily based on economics, but on combinations of things like value system, social status and stereotypes. For example, my mother was being nice in some sense by not replacing the old domestic help. Perhaps that was her intention. But was she being nice really, in a game theoretic sense? I think not.
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There's a lot more to say about this topic, which I'll do in later posts. I look forward to your ideas on the big why question and how can this be changed.