Talk:Diner's dilemma
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[edit] We Need the Phrase "Fixed Fraction of Total Consumption" to appear explicitly
I gave two examples in the talk page of the Prisoner's Dilemma entry. A kind person rightly pointed me to here. The Diner's Dilemma was only a link, item-in-a-list, in Prisoner's Dilemma article.
The Diner's Dilemma need not be choice of expensive entree vs inexpensive -- think about nearly continuosly variable consumption increases: more appetizers, more wine, more beers, more desserts (pretend you are on a cruise for example). Maybe it is more simple with just cheap/expensive entree.
In any case, my version of Diner's Dilemma is virtually isomorphic to ApartmentBldg Utilities Dilemma. This was FOR REAL: I was in an apartment building of 64 units (inhabited by many graduate students, but also some undergrads & others). Anyway, the TOTAL ELECTRICITY COSUMED for the entire building was what the management & utility company knew & that was it (no individual metering). Apt bldg managment each month provided a copy of the utility statement & each rental unit paid exactly one-sixty-fourth of that statement to the apartment management. Every unit paid the same: 1/64 times total.
If you let your apartment become an oven and only turned on AC when you come home (individual unit [thru-wall] air conditioners) then you saved next to nothing in utility cost and then got the sucker's payoff of having to wait 2 hours to get comfortable while everybody else runs AC while they are gone all day. You would be a fool not to do the same since you'll be paying 63/64 of the cost of all-day-AC-running anyway. Why suffer through the 2 hours of cool-down time every day?
On the other hand, if everybody kills their AC when they leave their apartment, hey just leave your AC on all the time -- it'll cost you only 1/64 th of the real electricity you added to the net consumption and you can enjoy your lap-of-luxury of a cool apartment whenever you arrive home; plus you benefit additionally from never even having to tax yourself thinking about to/not-to run AC.
So whatever the other folks do, you do best by running AC all the time. Other renters reason similarly. And thus you all run up a huge bill for the total and now your 1/64th of that bill is itself much larger than had everybody been conservative. (One-sixty-fourth of "huge" is a lot more money than one-sixty-fourth of "modest".)
Whether it be dining or paying utilities, the "fixed fraction of total consumption when each person can choose how much to consume" is a full-blown prisoner's dilemma. This GENERAL POINT, not ultra-sophisticated logic / math, is just as worthy of emphasis as the things about bicycle races, drafting cars, aggressive driving and others. One difference is that it possible that it wasn't the participants all on their own who brought about the causal levers for the dilemma. For the racers, drivers, and diners, the participants themselves constructed the dilemma, but in the case of the apartment building utilities, the absence of individual unit metering caused the dilemma. Was this done "on-purpose" so the utility company would make more money knowing that such is the result of the PD that they had set up?
I'd be happy to hear of other "fixed fraction of total consumption" scenarios.
