Well there’s not much else on at the moment so let me tell you about a study I recently took part in, which I think it’s OK to talk about a little now in general terms (with some of the bits omitted) because I’ve just been paid off. You fill out forms saying what you would do and then are randomly paired up with someone else, and there’s about £25 to be won in total.
To my knowledge there hasn’t been a gameshow based around the Ultimatum Game (maybe Divided as a variant), one of the games that form part of economic game theory.
In this game there is a resource, lets say 100 units. Person A proposes how it should be split. Person B decides to accept or reject the offer. If they accept, both get paid off how A split it. If B rejects, both go empty handed. There’s an added wrinkle in this particular experiment in that in some games if B rejects, A gets a small amount of money anyway (about one-sixth of what’s on offer).
As Player B you have both none of the power and all the power – in theory you can veto anything not shared equally, but by the same token leaving with *something* is better and more rational than leaving with *nothing*. In theory A can push quite hard with this knowledge, especially as in some instances they stand to make money regardless. The question is how far are you willing to roll over and take it?
As it turned out as a Player B I was pretty happy to suck it up – up to a point, expecting that I should be better off than Player A would be if he was worst off (i.e. I want more than zero, and a little bit more than what they’d get in games with a consolation prize).
Happily it turns out that I was paired up with someone pretty generous and I won about £11. My first thought was “oh that’s quite nice!” My second thought was “what a sucker, they should have had a lot more.”
Anyway that was a lot of fun, and to top it all off I appeared to have wangled myself a free coleslaw getting KFC on the way home. When you’re up you’re up.
I recall seeing a trailer for this:
http://www.geneticentertainment.com/portfolio-items/deadlock/
From the creators of Unan1mous, which is another variation (with strong notes of both Unan1mous and Divided ). You can’t tell from the blurb (and the trailer not working for me), but the denouement was that the person who ended up getting nothing would be able to veto the final decision, and everyone else would also leave empty-handed (but wouldn’t discover the outcome until leaving the studio and opening their case.
Basically, a slightly friendlier version of that old Endemol chestnut, the dreaded prisoner mechanic, then.
I could though, actually see this working as a show finisher to a quiz, where the final two standing play this ‘game’ for the marbles.
Which is A and which is B would be decided by who answered the most correct questions, and put the most money in the pot.
The problem with a lot of game theory games played straight is that they become too solvable. If you were playing with a pot of £10,000, Player A will always offer a 9k/1k split, because £1000 is the lowest big amount of money that Player B will regret refusing and if there’s one thing that kills the longevity of a show it’s predictability of unpredictable outcomes (the same reason we get bored of money tree shows, because instead of the results being a scattergun they are more often than not too close to a bell curve).
By the time you start to offer up the sorts of money where the decisions might be more interesting you’d be getting into unsustainable territory, but even then the offers would eventually converge.
I’d think the pirate game has some potential:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_game
Say you spend a game answering Q&A to build a bank- but before the final round to try and win the bank, the person who earned the most has to decide how the money will be split. If the majority agree, all the players play the final round for that amount. If the majority disagree, the first player is out of the game, and the 2nd player in line gives their offer.
This continues until an offer is accepted or they get down to two players- then the player with the higher score is the A player, and the other player is the B player in a semi-ultimatum game- if the B player turns the offer down, they play the final round alone for the entire pot. So the weakest player could end up winning it all.
However, the final round for the bank will be very easy to win with all the players, but would be very difficult to win alone. (since they don’t know how many offers would be made before one was accepted, it could be time-based; more players mean more time to win).