Friday, October 21, 2016

Why "Berners For Charlotte Pritt" Are In A Prisoner's Dilemma

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.

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Joseph Higginbotham has written hundreds of articles and columns for dozens of magazines, journals and newspapers. 
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