Hawks and Doves Start Tweeting
Have you ever wanted to test another person’s limits for monetary gain? You’re not alone! A new twitter game invites participants to do just this. Cory Doctorow documents Jeremy Bornstein’s new twitter party game. In it a circle of players forms, and each player passes their phone to their right, with their twitter account open. The player to their right then composes a tweet, and leaves it unsent, passing the phone back to its owner. If the owner doesn’t want the tweet posted to their account they secretly pass the composer $20 (which is added to the pot), with their phone, and otherwise they simply pass back their phone and allow the tweet to be posted (but it isn’t posted yet). At the end of the round everyone reveals whether or not they are holding $20. If the group’s decisions are homogeneous–everyone chooses to post, or everyone chooses to pay–the messages are not posted, and any paid money goes to the pot. On a heterogeneous round (some pay, some post) the pot is divided between those who choose to post their messages.
For each player, the optimal outcome is to receive the maximum value from the round, which is the positive monetary value (a share of pot, plus the $20 they committed to the round) minus the negative value of the posted message to their account. The only time in which a dominant strategy exists for players is when the price of posting the message is above any possible gain (in which case they pay), or below $20 (in which case they post). When no dominant strategy exists a player will wish to coordinate her actions with or against the other players, but is unable to because each player is unaware of the value of other players’ messages, and the monetary value of not posting is dependent on other players’ actions. In a large group of people it would be hard to imagine that the potential monetary benefits would not outweigh the cost of the message, for at least one participant (for example, someone may get a very benign tweet).
These concepts relate clearly to the discussion of hawk-dove games in chapter 6 because any players who do not have a dominant strategy (always post or always pay) have an optimal payoff if all other players choose not to post (doves) and they choose to post (one hawk). The more hawks enter the game, the lower the payoff of being a hawk, as the pot is split between more people.
One last rule. No one can delete their tweet until the next time they play the game.