Games are largely seen as enjoyable ways to pass the time, with the outcome not to be taken too seriously, but of course game theory defines games more broadly as any interaction between decision makers who probably have well-defined (if different) preferences.

A recent study from the Sante Fe Institute probed how much people would be willing to pay to bend the rules of the game they’re playing to better suit them.

The researchers used baseball to test their theory, with participants asked to imagine they had a baseball team and could pay the umpires to favor your team.  In game theory, the suggestion is that people will pay as much as can be undertaken without the opponent seeing that you’ve cheated and bent the rules.

Bending the rules

The researchers created a couple of scenarios, one in which the bribe was spotted by the opposing team’s manager, and a second where that same manager knew you had the chance to bribe the umpire, but wasn’t sure if you actually did or not.

Unlike in traditional game theory, in these scenarios people aren’t always aware of what the best course of action is, even after their decision has been made, and this in turn influences their decision-making process.

“When considering whether or not to change the parameters of the game,” the researchers explain, “[players] will consider how difficult their future decisions will be.”

Or in other words, they factor in the irrationality of their future selves when gauging their willingness to pay the bribe now.

“Potentially, these results apply to an extremely broad range of scenarios ranging from games in which the rules govern the flow of information among the players to games in which the rules are more prosaic, like tax rates,” the authors suggest, “Our analysis shows that in many of these situations, a player will be their own worst enemy; if they were less greedy, they would have made a lot more money.”