Heh, I am one of 11 kids, no one waited for anyone else to make a decision as to whether to eat dessert or not. It was tuck in or miss out. It still haunts me to this day. When the prawns land on the table there’s no waiting around for other people to take first pick. Dessert comes and I’ll have all of them. I feel like a vacuum cleaner sometimes. I apologise later when I realise I have made a pig of myself though. ;))

Good shiz, I’d be keen to read it!

Coordination games are cool. Makes me wish I was doing applied game theory for a living 😉

I wrote a paper earlier in the year expressing the reality this paradox plays within the participatory consultation processes of international development organisations 😉

My family is as hard headed as I am – so if any of us were to suggest that it was silly, the rest of us would refuse to order anything as a matter of principle 😀

In my experience, discussing it helps people to realise how silly it is. It’s common to hear the phrase “screw it” at this point, closely followed by “I’ll have the cheesecake”.

Knowing that other people feel bad about being the only one to order a beer or to order a big dessert, I make a deliberate point of doing both. For the benefit of others. Because I’m a humanitarian. Perhaps one of the only ones left.

Very true. Family events always make me more sympathetic to the idea of a benevolent social planner.

Perhaps not in your family, but in some cases there’s a second coordination game at play — the game of “If you’re getting that, I’ll get this, then we can share and both get the benefit of tasting two desserts”. This is sometimes declared and sometimes not.

I’ve seen it go massively multilateral where, frankly, it’d be easier to just have a lazy susan — but in a constrained-communication environment it seems this would be a terrible minefield of potential regret for people who want to optimise their dessert consumption by variety rather than quantity.

L

That is true – and I did consider that the “fatness/unhealthiness” concern, combined with a cost of explicitly mentioning it, could actually imply that the eqm that we ended in is optimal.

And that is the kicker, no matter how hard we try we can’t observe other peoples preferences, so it’s all conjecture!

Oooops 😛

But while I’m here, what I meant was that the payoffs in the co-ordination game are probably a function of the resolution mechanism. So, ex ante, no dessert may be inferior. But, once you start discussing it, the ‘fatness’ becomes more salient to people and changes the payoffs such that ‘no dessert’ is now the optimal outcome. Essentially, talking about co-ordinating on dessert may re-frame the game.