Game Theory meets the Dating Game

Today's post is about "kids these days."  I've synthesized these thoughts from multiple conversations I've had with various girlfriends and guys in the dating world.  Everyone is dissatisfied with status quo.  But why?  I can't tell you how annoyed I get when a girlfriend of mine says "my problem is that the guys in Pittsburgh suck."  What, you can't find a single guy in the whole city who is interesting?  I find that hard to believe.  Maybe people aren't your problem, maybe it's your approach.   

The Modern Woman

Today's modern woman insists that she is powerful, liberated, and expresses herself through promiscuity galore.  Out with traditional morals!  Who needs them?  They are for boring prudes who hate fun!  However, the modern woman also becomes confused when she's done with her wild and crazy college days and wants to settle down.  Why do all men of the world just want to have fun?  Why won't they commit???!  Well, my dear feminist friends, you've been training them to want fun with no commitment for years.  I am about to show you how the modern feminist ideals put you in a position of less power than traditional values.  In business, you always want the position of power in negotiations and I don't see why life should be approached any differently.

Traditional Value: Men hold doors for women
Modern Value: Women are liberated and can hold doors for themselves
Question: If a man is going out of his way to make life easier for you, your presence affects his actions, right? You are in the dominant role.

Traditional Value: Women expect a label for a relationship as soon as one develops.  Presumably the label will be "exclusive dating" and it will lead to marriage, provided things go well.
Modern Value:  Looking for a holla back girl?  Awesome.  Because the modern woman likes playing the field and getting used by....err calling the shots with....lots of men.
Question: How many businesses do you know operate without binding contracts?  If your supplier says that they just don't feel like delivering the merchandise today because they're busy with another client, your business is in jeopardy.  Why would you operate your personal life any differently?  Powerful people demand binding contracts on their terms.  If the binding contract isn't to their liking, they finish business and find a new deal.

Traditional Value: A date involves a man picking a woman up and taking her out to dinner for conversation and good food.  If it goes well, he can ask for another date when he drops her off that night.
Modern Value: Forget picking up the modern woman, she wants to meet at a bar, get drunk, and hook up.  She's also fine with walking herself home in the morning, preferably without waking you.
Question: Walk yourself home?  Hook up without knowing anything about him?  Buy your own drinks?  This sounds like a desperate cry for attention.  Think about these types of powerless statements in a business setting.  If a company asks for an interview, their approach is very important.  When you're forced to pay for and transport yourself, you're disposable, at best.  If a company wants you, they fly you out for an interview and take you out on the town.  That's called being in a power position.

Traditional Value: A man must ask for permission from his girlfriend's father before asking her to marry him.
Modern Value:  The modern woman doesn't understand why her dad needs to be involved.  She is the one getting married and she'll make her own decisions.
Question: In a corporate setting, how many significant contracts get signed by the entry level employees?  Answer: none.  They always bring in the big dogs...the vice presidents and CFO's....the guys with ample experience to negotiate the deal.  Marriage is one of life's most important contracts and the experience of a dad can only help.  After all, he was a young boy once and he knows who the nice guys are and how to weed out everyone else.

Game Theory is a strategic decision making method.  It is a complex idea, but I will try to simplify it before applying it to our situation here.  The Prisoner's Dilemma is a popular story used to explain Game Theory.  I pulled a version of the story from Wikipedia and posted it below:

"Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of speaking to or exchanging messages with the other. The police admit they don't have enough evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge. They plan to sentence both to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the police offer each prisoner a Faustian bargain. If he testifies against his partner, he will go free while the partner will get twenty years in prison on the main charge. Oh, yes, there is a catch ... If both prisoners testify against each other, both will be sentenced to five years in jail."

Therefore, if both criminals testify against each other (each hoping that the other won't testify), they will end up being sentenced to 5 years (which is longer than if neither testified).  It would be to both of their benefits to remain silent and leave with a lesser charge.  However, the reward of going free is a tempting offer.  A prisoner could go free if he testified while the other stayed silent, in hopes of the best outcome.  A method of expressing the situation and possible decisions is shown below:

	Prisoner B stays silent (cooperates)	Prisoner B betrays (defects)
Prisoner A stays silent (cooperates)	Each serves 1 year	Prisoner A: 20 years Prisoner B: goes free
Prisoner A betrays (defects)	Prisoner A: goes free Prisoner B: 20 years	Each serves 5 years (NASH)

"Solution concepts are usually based on what is required by norms of rationality.  In non-cooperative games, the most famous of these is the Nash equilibrium.  A set of strategies is a Nash equilibrium if each represents a best response to the other strategies. So, if all the players are playing the strategies in a Nash equilibrium, they have no unilateral incentive to deviate, since their strategy is the best they can do given what others are doing."The solution to the dilemma is called "Nash Equilibrium" and was explained well on the Wikipedia page, so I'll copy/paste that here as well:

In this situation, Nash equilibrium occurs when each prisoner defects by testifying about the other.  This may seem counterintuitive since they will both end up with 5 years of prison time.  However, staying silent puts them at risk for staying 20 years.  The reward could be better if the other prisoner stays silent, however, this cannot be assured.  Therefore......

"The dilemma then is that mutual cooperation yields a better outcome than mutual defection but it is not the rational outcome because the choice to cooperate, at the individual level, is not rational from a self-interested point of view."

Alright, now that we've gone through the complicated theory, we can summarize by saying that businesses use Game Theory to make sure they always "win" in a given scenario.  Although some situations are less desirable than others, the aim is prevent a situation where your competitor wins and you lose. 

Back to the previous scenario......

Girls want guys to commit.  Girls often date guys, move in with them (because they're modern women that disregard traditional practices), spend the best years of their lives "seeing if things work out." Often they don't.  The girl is several years older and back at the drawing board.  On the other hand, the guy has been living with the benefits of marriage and no long-term commitment.  His biological clock isn't pressuring him.  He has no problem starting over with someone younger and cuter.  In this scenario, the girl loses.  In scenarios where one party insists on marriage and the other wants to play house, break ups occur.  In the scenario where both boy and girl insist on marriage, they both win.  The guy gets the benefits of marriage and the girl gets commitment.  Thus, Nash equilibrium is achieved.

	Guy agrees to play house	Guy insists on marriage
Girl agrees to play house	Guy wins, Girl loses	Break up (when does this ever happen?)
Girl insists on marriage	Break up	Guy wins, Girl wins

There you have it.  Traditional values are derived from tried and true, intelligent, and strategic decisions.  I find it interesting the popular culture today rejects them so completely.  I suppose every generation has to figure it out for themselves.  All of the flower children from the 70's have grown up and their children are trying to do that as well (and failing).  

Conclusions:

1) Successful businesses surround themselves with experienced people and take advantage of their expertise.  Do the same thing in your life and you'll likely succeed. 

2) I have very little sympathy for those of you who make bad decisions and then complain to me about them. 

How Science Lost Me

Hello to my readers.  I intend for this blog to be a synthesis of thoughts that originate in conversations and experiences from my every day life.  It is not meant as a ranting medium or method of passively aggressively achieving catharsis, but as a forum for thinkers to exchange interesting thought nuggets about humanity. 

Onto my first topic: How science lost me.  I was a Biology Major in college.  Everything about science fascinated me.  You could explain away any concern or solve any problem in the world with it.  Why do lightning bugs glow?  Well that's a simple chemical reaction involving luminol.  What causes tornadoes?  That's a principle of physics involving thermodynamics.  Why are some people resistant to HIV?  That's a genetic principle involving cellular receptors.   I knew I would love my career forever, as long as it involved one of the scientific disciplines.

However, my naïf enthusiasm was eroded away with time as I entered the real world.  I worked in a research lab at PPG for a year.  Then I spent 2 years getting a master's degree in Microbiology and Infectious Diseases.  I went on to work at a Biotech start up and then moved on to an academic Immunology lab at Pitt.  Through these experiences, I noticed that the academic world of science is a very toxic place.  I felt this in my gut, but am only beginning to understand it after some enlightening thoughts I've encountered at business school. 

You might be thinking, "Toxic? That's a pretty strong word. I don't know if I believe this."  I've had several conversations with others who have similar positions and their observations have been similar as well.

First of all, the average academic lab is a horizontally structured environment.  In the corporate world, there is much more vertical hierarchy (a CEO is in charge of a team of upper management, who manage the middle management, who manage the entry level positions).  In an academic lab, you have the Principle Investigator who is in charge of everyone.  "Everyone" has different levels of skills and education and therefore the PhD's tend to think that they're most important or more in-control than the non PhD's. This phenomenon gives rise to sub-hierarchies that don't formally exist, but are abided.  They are typically put into place by the occurrence of a PhD temper tantrum.  Subsequently, all others take a submissive position in order to avoid conflict.

 In addition to a subjective hierarchical structure, ego's are encouraged and teamwork is discouraged.  Sure, academic scientists "collaborate," but these collaborations are full of posturing, battles for control and credit disputes.  

This is due to a foundational flaw in the system: Lack of concrete benchmarks and proper incentives.  

In any corporate workplace, teamwork is encouraged to achieve corporate goals.  Usually a product or service is the end goal and increase in revenue or product launches is a concrete number by which to gauge success.  In academia, publishing papers and obtaining grants is the only means of measuring success.  Therefore, when your project is launched, your goal is to have as few team mates as possible so you don't have to share credit when the paper is published.  Therefore, you hope that the only idea generators in the project are you, you, and you.  You also don't appreciate the inputs of others, even though the inputs might be valuable.  

I can objectively say that this is a terrible incentivizing structure.  Instead of gathering people with different ideas and different talents, you try to exclude them.  Can anyone tell me how this environment leads to innovation?  

I recently read an amazing article in the July-August 2011 edition of the Harvard Business Review.  It is entitled "Bringing minds together."  In this article, the founder of Boston Scientific expresses similar ideas about how the structure of an organization determines whether innovation will be successful.  He agrees that academia is outside of the mold and left me inspired by the following quote: 

"The ability to lead leaders is a rare skill."  

When you get to a certain point in life, everyone you're surrounded by is motivated.  They all got good grades in school and they all try to get ahead in life.  Therefore they are all going to be constantly competing with one another.  A truly talented leader will observe and identify each person's unique strengths and synthesize a scenario where everyone can work together, feel good about their unique strengths, and recognize the strengths of others.  People spend so much time working against each other on a social level, that if they were able to focus collectively on the work at hand, they could be insanely productive.  It is up to the company to use their talents in the most effective way possible. 

I think there are plenty of thought nuggets for now and will conclude my post.  The main lessons I've gathered from these thoughts:

1. Always stay passionate about what you're doing.....life gets really boring when you lose it.

2. Try to find healthy work environments that allow you to do your passion and appreciate you while you're doing it.

3. If you hate temper tantrums, stay away from 3 year olds and PhD's.