Great Leap ‘Forward’ wishful thinking, poor incentives, hungry Table 1.3: How to cripple an agricultural economy: Statistics during China’s “Great Leap Forward” Start (1957) End (1959) Forecasted output 195 MM tons 525 MM tons (1958) Grain output 195 MM tons 170 MM tons Grain imports 2.1 MM tons 3.9 MM tons Grain procured from communes 46 MM tons 64 MM tons Grain kept by rural areas 273 kg/capita 193 kg/capita Rural per-capita calorie consumption 2100 calories/day 1500 calories/day (1960) % of provinces where workers can not exit communes 20% (1955) 60% (1957)
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Great Leap ‘Forward’ wishful thinking, poor incentives, hungry Table 1.3: How to cripple an agricultural economy: Statistics during China’s “Great Leap.
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Great Leap ‘Forward’ wishful thinking, poor incentives, hungry
Table 1.3: How to cripple an agricultural economy: Statistics during China’s “Great Leap Forward”
Start (1957)End (1959)
Forecasted output 195 MM tons 525 MM tons (1958)
Grain output 195 MM tons 170 MM tons
Grain imports 2.1 MM tons 3.9 MM tons
Grain procured from communes 46 MM tons 64 MM tons
Grain kept by rural areas 273 kg/capita 193 kg/capita
Rural per-capita calorie consumption
2100 calories/day 1500 calories/day (1960)
% of provinces where workers can not exit communes
20% (1955) 60% (1957)
Centralization, I
Table 1.2: Failure rates in public and private expeditions to the North Pole and Northwest Passage (Karpoff, 2001)
Public (n=35)Private (n=56)
Crew deaths (%) 8.0 6.2
Number of ships (number lost) 1.63 (.53) 1.15 (.24)
% with scurvy 46.7% 13.2%
Unintended consequences
• ...A law enforcement source in Chicago said police see some evidence of soldiers working with gangs here. Police recently stopped a vehicle and found 10 military flak jackets inside. A gang member in the vehicle told investigators his brother was a Marine and sent the jackets home, the source said. (from Sun-Times)
• "We're lowering our standards," [Defense Department gang detective Scott] Barfield said. • "A friend of mine is a recruiter," he said. "They are being told less than five tattoos is not an
issue. More than five, you do a waiver saying it's not gang-related. You'll see soldiers with a six-pointed star with GD [Gangster Disciples] on the right forearm."[....]
• Of particular concern are reports that the Folk Nation, consisting of more than a dozen gangs in the Chicago area, is placing young members in the military in an effort to gather information about weapons and tactics, said FBI Special Agent Andrea Simmons, who is based in El Paso, Texas.
• "Our understanding is that they find members without a criminal history so that they can join, and once they get out, they will have a new set of skills that they can apply to criminal enterprises," Simmons said. "This could be a concern for any law enforcement agency that has to deal with gangs on a daily basis.“
• According to the Tribune, “nearly every one of the cases that we have looked into, it is a young man or woman who thought that the symbol looked cool," said Christopher Grey, spokesman for the Army's Criminal Investigation Command. "We have found some people even get gang tattoos not really knowing what they are, or at least that they have not had any gang affiliation the past."
The thinking steps model• Discrete steps of thinking• Step 0’s choose randomly
K-step thinkers know proportions f(0),...f(K-1)*
Normalize g(h)=f(h)/ h=0K-1 f(h) and best-respond
A j(K)=m (sj,sm) (Pm(0) g(0) + Pm(1) g(1)+... Pm(K-1)g(K-1))
logit probability P j(K)=exp(Aj(K))/ hexp(Ah(K))
• What is the distribution of thinking steps f(K)?
*alternative: K-steps think others are one step lower (K-1)
Poisson distribution of thinking steps• Working memory bound f(k)/f(k-1)1/k f(K)=K/eK! 84 games: median • Heterogeneous (“spikes” in data)• Steps > 3 are rare (Keynes, Binmore, Stahl et al)• Steps can be linked to cognitive measures
Poisson distributions for various
00.05
0.10.15
0.20.25
0.30.35
0.4
0 1 2 3 4 5 6
number of steps
fre
qu
en
cy
Dominance-solvable game (Nash, 1,1; CH .73,1)
COLUMN
Left(.95) Right
Top(.86) 30, 20 10, 18
ROW
Bottom 20, 20 20, 18
Dominance-solvable game results
L R Nash CH Data 06
Data 07
T 30, 20 10, 18 1.00 .73 .81 .86
B 20, 20 20, 18 .00 .27 .19 .14
Nash 1.00 .00
CH .89 .11
Data 06 .95 .05
Data 07 .95 .05
Keynes’s “beauty contest analogy”
• Professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view. It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one's judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practise the fourth, fifth and higher degrees. (Keynes, GTMEI)
1 learns (A,B) or (C,D)2 learns (A), (B,C) or (D)Should they bet?
• Figure ?: Professor Rafael Robb: Guilty of hubris and murder or neither?
• A possibly ironic touch comes at the very end of the AP story (“Penn Professor Charged in Wife’s Slaying”, jan 8, 2007):
• Penn officials said earlier that they had arranged for someone else to teach Robb's graduate seminar in game theory this semester.
Insurance company exclusions• Air traffic control
Building, movingChemical/rubber manufacturingCircus or carnival workConcrete or asphalt workCrop dustingFirefightingFurniture and fixtures manufacturingLumber work, including wood chopping, timber cutting and working in a sawmillMigrant laborOil well or refinery workPolice workRoofingSandblastingSports, semi-pro or professionalStockyard work, with or without butcheringStables, all employeesStunt workTelecom installationTransportation and aviationTree climbingTunnel workWar reportingWindow work at heights exceeding three stories
Theories of human nature• Crucial for organizational design
• Are people good & need opportunity (Theory Y) or bad & need constraint (theory X)? (a la Maslow hierarchy)
• Models:– States vs traits (sorting good from bad)– Differences in social preferences
• “self-interest seeking with guile” (opportunism) as limiting case (or ASPD?)
– Social image & moral wriggle room
States vs traits• Behavior due to situational “states” or personal
(immutable) “traits”? • Attribution theory (Kelley, Nisbett-Ross):
– (Western) tendency to overestimate effect of global traits & ability to do trait inference (e.g. interviews)
– E.g. question-answer study – E.g. Asian vs Caucasian “brains vs work” in
educational success– Self-serving tendency to blame state for bad outcome,
claim trait credit for good outcome (annual reports, oil company executive pay)
Social preferences
• Will sacrifice money to help/hurt others• Dictator game• Ultimatum game• One view (inequality-aversion):
– Dislike envy & guilt– Prefer equal shares
• Another view– Rawlsitarian (like $, minimum, total)
• Best guess?: 40% selfish, 50% conditional cooperators, 10% “saints”
The right view of human nature? (from Dawes and Thaler 1988)
Ultimatum vs dictator “games” (Forsythe et al 1994) NB: Dictator games are “weak situations”, more variance
This is your brain on unfairness: Areas that are differentially active facing unfair offers (1-2) versus fair offers (4-5)
(Sanfey et al 04 Science)
Ultimatum offer experimental sites
Ultimatum offers across societies (mean shaded, mode is largest circle…)
A subject complaining post-experiment (Zamir, 2000)
Social image• People do not care directly about others• People care about how others perceive them
(2nd-order belief)– Few large anonymous donations– Choose $9 or Play $10 dictator game Information avoidance
• Dana-Weber-Kuang/Feiler studies• High-risk people avoiding an AIDS test• Cross the street to avoid a homeless person• “Plausible deniability”• HP Chief Ethics Officer (?): “I shouldn’t have asked”