Cutting a cake
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_choose
Once upon a time, I was nine years-old and there was a dessert laid before my eyes for me and my father to split. My father took this opportunity to describe to me the fairest way to split a piece of food. Have one person split the dessert and have the other choose which piece they want. This is a great way to split because it becomes in the splitter’s interest to cut the dessert as evenly as possible because the other person will simply pick the largest slice. In this way, whether the second person picks the first half or second half becomes dependent on the quality of the first person’s cut, and we can see the game develop before our eyes. While this is not the most complex game, after reading the above wikipedia article, there’s a lot of interesting complications that can turn it into more of a game like the one’s we’ve heard of in class.
The idea of different toppings being on the cake and different people having preferences for certain toppings can really throw a wrench in the game, especially when the two players are unaware of each other’s preferences. As referenced in the wikipedia article, if a cake was half-vanilla and half-chocolate and one player preferred vanilla while the other preferred chocolate, even though it would be in the cutter’s best interests to cut it so they get all of their favorite topping, it is likely that the cutter will instead try to be more fair, rejecting what is best for them to preserve good standing with other player, even though in reality the greedy decision was the most utilitarian one. This example just goes to show how Game Theory can pop up really easily in everyday life, and isn’t relegated only to prison sentences and doves.