Voting Prisoners Dilemma

October 21st, 2012
On election day you find yourself talking to a supporter of the Purple Party. As a member of the Pink Party you find the Purple candidate reprehensible, and you would be quite upset if they won, but of course the Purple supporter feels the opposite way. Neither of you have voted yet, and voting is kind of annyoing, so you'd rather not do it. You propose that instead of voting you both stay home, and they accept. But should you actually stay home?

The payoffs are:

You Vote You Stay Home
They Vote You each have the hassle of voting, your candidates relative rankings are unchanged. They have the hassle of voting, their candiate goes up by one.
They Stay Home You have the hassle of voting, your candiate goes up by one Both get to not vote, rankings are unchanged.

I'm not actually interested in how people would answer this; I like it as an alternate statement of the Prisoner's dilemma. Voting is 'defecting', staying home is 'cooperating'.

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Ozy and Vasili Review Lilo and Stitch

Sometimes my seven-year-old, Vasili, wants to see some godawful movie that makes me want to melt my eyeballs out of my head.

via Thing of Things June 27, 2025

Elixir's Last Dance

On May 18th, the contra dance band Elixir had their last gig ever. The dance was packed: there were three hundred people. It was the only dance BIDA has ever done where they sold tickets. People flew from across the country just to hear Elixir play one la…

via Lily Wise's Blog Posts June 5, 2025

Workshop House case study

Lauren Hoffman interviewed me about Workshop House and wrote this post about a community I’m working on building in DC.

via Home April 30, 2025

more     (via openring)