What others say : Post 3 : HOW NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST : Newscape article from THE HINDU, dt. 20.3.2008

GI's preface : Suddenly, the world seems to be going the maverick's way?! listening to him?! okay, there are others like him, in this world, that's the answer! So, Khudi ko bulund kar itna......et. al....enjoy the article !
bwr,
ganesh.

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Excerpted from THE HINDU, Chennai edition newspaper dated 20.3.2008 :

Link : http://www.hindu.com/2008/03/20/stories/2008032051422200.htm

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How nice guys finish first


Study disproves saying in games of prisoner’s dilemma

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Individuals escalating conflicts often end up losing

Cooperating with opponent pays off in the long run


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WASHINGTON: Screaming sports coaches and cut-throat tycoons have it wrong: nice guys do finish first, a new study suggests.

The Harvard University study involved 100 Boston-area college students playing the same game over and over — a punishment-heavy version of the classic one-on-one brinksmanship game of prisoner’s dilemma. The research appears in Thursday’s edition of the journal Nature.

Common game theory has held that punishment makes two equals cooperate. But when people compete in repeated games, punishment fails to deliver, said Martin Nowak, the author of the study.

He is director of the evolutionary dynamics laboratory at Harvard where the study was conducted.

“On the individual level, we find that those who use punishments are the losers,” Mr. Nowak said his experiments found. Those who escalate the conflict very often wound up doomed.

“It’s a very positive message,” said co-author David Rand, a Harvard biology graduate student researcher. “In general, the thing that is most, sort of, rational and best for your own self-interest is to be nice.”

The study looked at games between equals. Punishment does seem to have a place in games when one player is dominant and needs to enforce submission, Mr. Nowak said.

In the experiment, the students played more than 8,000 games of prisoner’s dilemma, using dimes to reward and punish. The normal game of prisoner’s dilemma gives two players two options: cooperate or defect.

If both cooperate, each ends up winning a dime. If both defect, each gets nothing. If one cooperates and the other defects, the cooperative player loses 20 cents and the defector wins 30 cents.

Mr. Nowak then added a “costly punishment” component. A player could choose to punish someone who did not cooperate. That penalised the non-cooperative person 40 cents, but the other player had to pay a dime to mete out the punishment.

When Mr. Nowak compared how much money people earned or lost in the long run, there was a noticeable correlation between punishment and overall money. The players who punished their opponents the least, or not at all, made the most money. Those who punished the most made the least money.

When faced with a nasty opponent, turning the other cheek and continuing to cooperate — or at least not handing out punishment — paid off more in the long run, the study found.

The paper makes sense and is interesting in its look at repeated interaction, said University of Central Florida Professor of Economics Elisabet Rutstrom, who works on game theory but was not part of the Harvard study.

Mr. Nowak said he next wants to study chief executives to see if the findings play out in the real world. — AP
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SOBEIT/thathastu!
jai ho!