Talk:Unscrupulous diner's dilemma

We Need the Phrase "Fixed Fraction of Total Consumption" to appear explicitly

I gave two examples in the talk page of the Prisoner's Dilemma entry. A kind person rightly pointed me to here. The Diner's Dilemma was only a link, item-in-a-list, in Prisoner's Dilemma article.

The Diner's Dilemma need not be choice of expensive entree vs inexpensive -- think about nearly continuosly variable consumption increases: more appetizers, more wine, more beers, more desserts (pretend you are on a cruise for example). Maybe it is more simple with just cheap/expensive entree.

In any case, my version of Diner's Dilemma is virtually isomorphic to ApartmentBldg Utilities Dilemma. This was FOR REAL: I was in an apartment building of 64 units (inhabited by many graduate students, but also some undergrads & others). Anyway, the TOTAL ELECTRICITY COSUMED for the entire building was what the management & utility company knew & that was it (no individual metering). Apt bldg managment each month provided a copy of the utility statement & each rental unit paid exactly one-sixty-fourth of that statement to the apartment management. Every unit paid the same: 1/64 times total.

If you let your apartment become an oven and only turned on AC when you come home (individual unit [thru-wall] air conditioners) then you saved next to nothing in utility cost and then got the sucker's payoff of having to wait 2 hours to get comfortable while everybody else runs AC while they are gone all day. You would be a fool not to do the same since you'll be paying 63/64 of the cost of all-day-AC-running anyway. Why suffer through the 2 hours of cool-down time every day?

On the other hand, if everybody kills their AC when they leave their apartment, hey just leave your AC on all the time -- it'll cost you only 1/64 th of the real electricity you added to the net consumption and you can enjoy your lap-of-luxury of a cool apartment whenever you arrive home; plus you benefit additionally from never even having to tax yourself thinking about to/not-to run AC.

So whatever the other folks do, you do best by running AC all the time. Other renters reason similarly. And thus you all run up a huge bill for the total and now your 1/64th of that bill is itself much larger than had everybody been conservative. (One-sixty-fourth of "huge" is a lot more money than one-sixty-fourth of "modest".)

Whether it be dining or paying utilities, the "fixed fraction of total consumption when each person can choose how much to consume" is a full-blown prisoner's dilemma. This GENERAL POINT, not ultra-sophisticated logic / math, is just as worthy of emphasis as the things about bicycle races, drafting cars, aggressive driving and others. One difference is that it possible that it wasn't the participants all on their own who brought about the causal levers for the dilemma. For the racers, drivers, and diners, the participants themselves constructed the dilemma, but in the case of the apartment building utilities, the absence of individual unit metering caused the dilemma. Was this done "on-purpose" so the utility company would make more money knowing that such is the result of the PD that they had set up?

I'd be happy to hear of other "fixed fraction of total consumption" scenarios.

"1/n of the meal" is not "the meal"

"1/n of the meal" is not "the meal" - why isn't it pointed out? 83.9.147.247 (talk) 16:56, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

• What do you mean? the point is that, with n people eating, each person will pay 1/n of the cost, the cost of the full meal isn't really applicable.

--MSSTU (talk) 16:14, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

The Proof is Incomplete

"By hypothesis the utility of ordering the expensive meal is higher." The utility of expensive meal is not always greater. I think We need to add the condition: g-b > (h-l)/n

Assumptions about Motivation and Valuation

At several points in the article, it is assumed that the only reason one might consume more when the bill is split would be if people were inconsiderate of the rest of the group. I think a more likely reason would be that one expects others in the group to consume more for a variety of reasons, and so sparing consumption would result in having to pay for more than one's fair share. The desire to avoid an unfair result for oneself is far more powerful than the tendency to disregard the well being of others, unless we're talking about sociopaths.

This view is purely based on my intuition and everyday experience, but surely there must be a fair number of psychology papers which discuss it in detail. My suggestion would be that the article should either source its assumptions regarding motivation with credible psychological research, or omit any discussion of motivation altogether. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 137.254.4.8 (talk) 18:08, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

"From the description above we have the following ordering h - l > g - b."

Based on the description, this is only true if one must eat the more expensive meal all alone, instead of in a group. If one is already eating alone, does the formula still hold true? And if not, is it sufficient to account for this personal preference as we expect? So imho, we can't assume merely that the difference in the cost of the meals exceeds the difference in satisfaction from each meal absolutely, without considering the case that one might prefer the more expensive meal even if paying one's own way, and would merely prefer to do so while sharing company with others who decide to split their bill evenly. Should this qualification should be noted or accounted for somewhere? UncleSim69 (talk) 01:35, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

Democracy

Has anyone ever applied this theory to mass democracy, with each voter being a "diner"? Obviously things like progressive taxation and the like make the comparison imperfect, but if there is any research on this area that'd be fascinating. I will look for some. Cameron Nedland (talk) 19:58, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

In politics it's the other way round. When Poll Taxes are introduced people vote for the party which promises to minimise the tax. Even poor people vote to minimise the tax even though they would benefit by more than the extra they would pay if they voted for a higher Poll Tax. 86.23.83.20 (talk) 17:10, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

Utility vs Neutrality of External Links

I recognize that external links aren't held to the same standards as Wikipedia; however, I'm not sure the current external link ("If You're Paying, I'll Have Top Sirloin") is sufficiently useful to warrant it's lack of neutrality.

The article provides a plain language explanation of the diner's dilemma (useful). However, there are problems with the real-world examples used.

1. There is no clear link between the real-world examples and the diner's dilemma. This makes it hard to understand how the diner's dilemma applies. I recognize that there may be links, but they're not obvious from the examples.
2. On a related note, most of the real-world examples involve other more relevant topics (commons dilemma, voting theory, etc.). This makes it easy to confuse these other topics with the diner's dilemma.

Overall, I think it is better to remove the external link.