Talk:Chainstore paradox

message: In reading the previous section of this talk page, I am confused about who did what to whose sections of the article and who is on whose side of the argument. All I know for sure is my position: the payoff matrix as presented in the article is complete and it is a perfect information game. And it doesn't matter to me whether you refer to the 20 competitors collectively as Player B or as Players B through U.
I have always understood chess to be the quintessential example of a perfect information deterministic game. The rules as published by FIDE completely describe how the game is played and who wins or draws. There is no requirement in those rules that each player has to reveal to the other player before the game begins what his/her strategy is and how (s)he would respond to any particular sequence of moves of the opponent. Aside from the fact that this would take more time to do than my entire life expectancy, I don't believe I know how I would respond to every possible position of the board (that is, the positions of all the pieces, whether either player has castled, etc.) presented to me. If I did, I wouldn't take any time at all to speak of to make a move, or to solve the chess puzzles (white to play and win in 3 moves, etc.) in newspapers. None of this changes the fact that the published rules of chess are complete, and the game is one of perfect information in the game-theoretic sense. And so is the chainstore game. -Hccrle (talk) 03:00, 2 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Complete information indeed 

message: It seems to me that the Chainstore Paradox is basically just a more complicated version of the Ultimatum Game.
In the Ultimatum Game, the game-theoretic solution is for the proposer to offer the smallest possible positive amount to the responder, and then for the responder to accept, because any positive amount is better than nothing.  In reality, human beings rarely behave that way (either because they are irrational, or because they are acting rationally in a context that is broader than the game being played), and so this strategy doesn't work in real life.
In the Chainstore Paradox, the game-theoretic solution is for B to always choose "in" and for A to always cooperate.  If all players mutually believe that all other players are acting rationally within the context of the game, then this solution is 100% correct.  But in real life, a deterrence strategy is likely to work, because once A starts going aggressive, player B will no longer believe that player A is a rational actor (within the context of the game), and the backwards-induction proof establishing B's strategy is only valid under the assumption that player A is a rational actor.
Both games illustrate that real people don't always behave rationally (within the bounds of the game), and that the optimal strategy against a rational player is not necessarily optimal against an irrational one. --Antistone (talk) 05:14, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chainstore Paradox vs Ultimatum Game 

message: Shelton originally described this thought experiment as the "chain store" paradox, not the "chainstore" paradox. Should this be fixed? Tommy2024 (talk) 03:33, 30 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chain store vs Chainstore