Where there are rules, there are winners and losers. The real trick is designing a set of rules that elicits the behavior you wanted to begin with.
I’m about as competitive a person as you’ll meet, and over the years I can take a quick look at the rules and conditions of a contest and tell you where the holes in the system are. In essence, the game becomes a meta-game for me — how quickly can I dismantle the original intent? I tried to do it at an Outward Bound Red Cross training over a year ago. Teams were given three hours to complete as many odd games and tasks as possible. My suggestion? Let’s skip the first half-hour, split up, and see how the other groups were faring with their feats. Steal the best ideas, and get done in record time. Our facilitator put a stop to that before we started (and admitted no one else had ever suggested it.)
The old Game-Breaker reared his ugly head again this week. My kids are going to a half-day Vacation Bible School, and the game is to see whether the boys or the girls can collect the most change for a charitable mission. There is a daily weigh-in for each side.
That’s right. Weigh in. Within an instant, I was scheming of ways to convert my daughter’s quarters and dimes into pennies, pronto. (Dimes are a particular handicap liability in this scoring system, with a very small weight-to-value ratio.)
Clearly, if the goal is to raise more money for charity, you have to buckle down and actually count the currency. Not while there are ways to exploit the rules.
The Tweak is On
This happens more than you think in sports. Rules and competition committees meet to decide how far the three-point-line must be from the goal, how much leeway a defensive back will get in putting his hands on a wide receiver, how wide the strike zone will be, how long before you must pass the ball or throw a pitch or take a shot… Each one of these rules is designed for one reason: To make the game as entertaining as possible. Who wants to see slow and boring slugfests? Tweak the game, get more fans in the gate and more remotes ordering premium pay-per-view packages and season passes.
Now, I’m not advocating cheating in any fashion. It’s one thing to blatantly break the rules to obtain a competitve advantage over opponents. It’s another to find an optimum strategy that exploits a peculiarity in the rules. If the game is no longer fun, then you blame the designer. 
Lore Sjoberg had a perfect example of this recently, explaining why he’d never enjoy any Superman-themed videogames: “An accurate Superman game would have one button labeled “Use Powers” and you would press it and win.”
The Game is All Around Us
I admit I’m more competitive than all of you. (You’re right, I didn’t say most, I said all.) But each and every one of us exploit the rules around us. For instance, there are parents out there who will put their children through several Vacation Bible Schools at different congregations over the course of the summer. (Hey, it’s cheaper than daycare.) It’s just that we don’t call it “Game Theory” when you’re sitting down and calculating if the extra distance to that other store will be worth the slight price break you’ll get retail.
More importantly, when you set up expectations and boundaries, are you really encouraging the behavior you want? If those in the mix start doing crazy things you never anticipated, there might be a hidden reward in your scoring system, or an unforeseen obstacle that makes your intended outcome impossible. As it happens, there is a correlation between weight and value for some US currency. A quarter is worth 2.5x a dime, and it weighs 2.5x as well — so a pound of quarters not only weighs as much as a pound of dimes, it will also buy as much. (The average weight of a nickel is exactly twice that of a penny, while having 5x the value.) 
So I’m off to the bank, to trade in silver coinage for those wonderfully heavy pennies that so many want to discontinue. Pennies from Heaven, I’ll call it!
A shortcut on your part in measuring success can make more than a dime’s worth of difference in the outcome.
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, Game Theory, Economics, Currency, Sports[/tags]
