A group of Bernie Sanders voters has been
kicking around the idea of trying to prevent Bill Cole or Jim Justice from
winning the governor's race. We've realized that if all Bernie voters cooperate
to vote for Charlotte Pritt, we could elect Pritt governor.
But it's a risky attempt. It's a classic
"Prisoner's Dilemma." If you like movies and TV shows about police
and lawyers, you've seen the prisoner's dilemma. You separate two criminals and
interrogate them separately and temp each to turn on the other in exchange for
a better deal. It almost never happens, but if the two suspects don't
"defect" and refuse to take individual deals or turn against
one another, the police can't touch them. But if the two suspects are willing o
turn on each other in exchange for leniency - and they usually are - the
cops get the info they need to build an airtight case.
"Berners For Charlotte Pritt" has a
classic prisoner's dilemma with a huge number of individual actors who could
defect and vote for one of the front-runners. If we all refuse to settle for
Cole or Justice and we stick together, we can elect Pritt and save West
Virginia from both of the frontrunners but if, say half of the Bernie vote
defects from the rest of us and votes for Justice or Cole, West Virginia gets a
governor who is unacceptable.
In game theory notation it looks like this:
T>R>P>S. Translation: Temptation to
defect is perceived to be greater than Reward to cooperate which is greater
than the perceived Penalty for defection which is greater than the perceived
Sucker's reward for cooperation. In plain English, just as the two suspects distrust
each other so much they gladly defect from the plan to tell the police nothing,
Bernie voters may believe that we can't get all the other voters to stick
together and vote for Pritt so we may be tempted to vote for Justice to prevent
a Cole governorship.
Like all prisoner's dilemmas, the plan to get
all Bernie voters to vote for Pritt only works if we stick together. The risk
is that we don't stick together and we elect take just enough votes from
Justice to elect Cole.
To elect Pritt we need a "Stag
Hunt" outcome that looks like this: R>T>P>S. The perceived Reward
for cooperating is greater than the Temptation to defect which is greater than
the Penalty for Defection which is greater than the fear of a Sucker's payoff.
Some of the Berners plan to hold their noses
and vote for Jim Justice. If only some of these reluctant Justice voters vote
for Pritt because they don't think they can trust us all to vote for Pritt, we
elect Bill Cole.
I'm voting for Charlotte Pritt.
And I’ll cast a write-in vote for Senator
Bernie Sanders.
--
Joseph Higginbotham has written hundreds of articles and columns for dozens of magazines, journals and newspapers.
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