Not Going with the Flow.

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.

Don Knuth

A man standing near a waterfall

If you are wanting to get away from it all at an idyllic island holiday destination, you want to be in the minority, not the majority, when it comes to everyone’s holiday destination of choice. The pub that ‘everyone’ chooses to go to because of the music or the food is going to turn out to be a far from ideal experience if you have to queue to get in, can’t find a chair and have to wait an hour to be served. You will do better at a less popular venue.

This is like playing a game where you ‘win’ by being in the minority. Typically, there will be an average number of people who choose to go to each of the venues on offer, but the fluctuations around the average will be very large. In order to reduce them and converge on a strategy that is more useful, it is necessary to use past information about the attendance at the venue. If you just try to guess the psychology of fellow customers, you will end up committing the usual sin of assuming that you are not average. You think that your choice will not also be made by lots of other people acting on the same evidence – that’s why you find that everyone else has decided to go for the same stroll by the river on a sunny Sunday afternoon. If there are two venues to choose between, then as a result of everyone’s accumulated experience the optimal strategy gets closer and closer to half of the people going to each venue – so neither is specially popular or unpopular – on the average. At first, the fluctuations around the average are quite large, and you might turn up at one venue to find a smaller than average crowd.

Water fountain in Italy

As time goes on, you use more and more past experience to evaluate when and if these fluctuations will occur and act accordingly, trying to go to the venue with the smaller number. If everyone acts in this way, the venue will maintain the same average number of attendees over time but the fluctuations will steadily diminish. The last ingredient of this situation is that there will be players who trust their memories and analyses of past experience, and there will be others who don’t or who only appeal to experience a fraction of the times when they have to make a choice. This tends to split the population into two groups – those who follow past experience totally and those who ignore it. Since the consequences of making the wrong choice are far more negative (no dinner, wasted evening) than the consequences of making the right choice are positive (quicker dinner, more comfortable evening), greater care is made to avoid wrong choices, and players tend to hedge their bets and go for each available choice with equal probability over the long run. Adopting a more adventurous strategy results in more extreme losses than gains. The result is a rather cautious and far from optimal pattern of group decision making and all the eating venues are less than full.

Also Read: - I Do Not Believe It!

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Image Credit :- Pixabay

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