On Interpreting Payoffs: Morality and Efficiency in Games

Many readers, but especially philosophers, might wonder why, in the case of the example taken up in the previous section, mechanism design should be necessary unless players are morbidly selfish sociopaths. Surely, the players might be able to just see that outcome (4,5) is socially and morally superior; and since the whole problem also takes for granted that they can also see the path of actions that leads to this efficient outcome, who is the game theorist to announce that, unless their game is changed, it's unattainable? This objection, which applies the distinctive idea of rationality urged by Immanuel Kant, indicates the leading way in which many philosophers mean more by ‘rationality’ than descriptive game theorists do. This theme is explored with great liveliness and polemical force in Binmore (1994, 1998).

This weighty philosophical controversy about rationality is sometimes confused by misinterpretation of the meaning of ‘utility’ in non-psychological game theory. To root out this mistake, consider the Prisoner's Dilemma again. We have seen that in the unique NE of the PD, both players get less utility than they could have through mutual cooperation. This may strike you, even if you are not a Kantian (as it has struck many commentators) as perverse. Surely, you may think, it simply results from a combination of selfishness and paranoia on the part of the players. To begin with they have no regard for the social good, and then they shoot themselves in the feet by being too untrustworthy to respect agreements.

This way of thinking is very common in popular discussions, and badly mixed up. To dispel its influence, let us first introduce some terminology for talking about outcomes. Welfare economists typically measure social good in terms of Pareto efficiency. A distribution of utility β is said to be Pareto superior over another distribution δ just in case from state δ there is a possible redistribution of utility to β such that at least one player is better off in β than in δ and no player is worse off. Failure to move from a Pareto-inferior to a Pareto-superior distribution is inefficient because the existence of β as a possibility, at least in principle, shows that in δ some utility is being wasted. Now, the outcome (3,3) that represents mutual cooperation in our model of the PD is clearly Pareto superior over mutual defection; at (3,3) both players are better off than at (2,2). So it is true that PDs lead to inefficient outcomes. This was true of our example in Section 2.6 as well.

However, inefficiency should not be associated with immorality. A utility function for a player is supposed to represent everything that player cares about, which may be anything at all. As we have described the situation of our prisoners they do indeed care only about their own relative prison sentences, but there is nothing essential in this. What makes a game an instance of the PD is strictly and only its payoff structure. Thus we could have two Mother Theresa types here, both of whom care little for themselves and wish only to feed starving children. But suppose the original Mother Theresa wishes to feed the children of Calcutta while Mother Juanita wishes to feed the children of Bogota. And suppose that the international aid agency will maximize its donation if the two saints nominate the same city, will give the second-highest amount if they nominate each others' cities, and the lowest amount if they each nominate their own city. Our saints are in a PD here, though hardly selfish or unconcerned with the social good.

To return to our prisoners, suppose that, contrary to our assumptions, they do value each other's well-being as well as their own. In that case, this must be reflected in their utility functions, and hence in their payoffs. If their payoff structures are changed so that, for example, they would feel so badly about contributing to inefficiency that they'd rather spend extra years in prison than endure the shame, then they will no longer be in a PD. But all this shows is that not every possible situation is a PD; it does not show that selfishness is among the assumptions of game theory. It is the logic of the prisoners' situation, not their psychology, that traps them in the inefficient outcome, and if that really is their situation then they are stuck in it (barring further complications to be discussed below). Agents who wish to avoid inefficient outcomes are best advised to prevent certain games from arising; the defender of the possibility of Kantian rationality is really proposing that they try to dig themselves out of such games by turning themselves into different kinds of agents.

In general, then, a game is partly defined by the payoffs assigned to the players. In any application, such assignments should be based on sound empirical evidence. If a proposed solution involves tacitly changing these payoffs, then this ‘solution’ is in fact a disguised way of changing the subject and evading the implications of best modeling practice.

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