Living the Robot-Mediated Life

It turns out people are pretty morbidly fascinated by Bethany Soule’s and my auction-based lifestyle.After Bethany’s Messy Matters article, “Love and/or Money,”it was picked up by NBCnews.com,which sparked a mini media firestorm.We were inNew York Magazine,were fodder for morning radio ridicule,and were even interviewed on Fox News.And we’re apparently about to go global, with an article in a huge South American magazine. [1]

So, by popular demand, I’m here to answer more questions about decision auctions and paying your spouse to put the kids to bed!Of course, this is part of a general theme with Bethany and me: applying principles of economics to everyday life.Which, if you haven’t noticed has been a running theme on Messy Matters: [2]

• How and when to give gifts for maximum social efficiency
• How to make calibrated predictions
• How to design a perfectly efficient negotiation mechanism (just kidding, you can’t)
• How to decide between buying vs renting
• How to do financial planning
• How to avoid not just the sunk cost fallacy, but hypercorrecting for it
• How to do sealed bids
• How to trust in statistics and not worry about things that “never” happen
• How to do what you want
• How to collect $810 from me if I don’t publish Messy Matters posts on time
• How to stochastically track your time
• How to decide when to buy insurance
• How to name things
• How to set deadlines for your students (if you have students)
• How to split a restaurant bill (and other tricks with stochastic payments)
• How to deal with email overload
• How to succeed in business by only trying a little bit every day
• How to conduct decision auctions with your loved ones

In other words, practiceapplied rationality! Overcome biases and be, generally, less wrong.Also, quantify yourself! Good decisions require good data.

A New Batch of Questions, with Answers

Q1. What are some examples of auctions for things besides chores?

Here’s a transcript that includes two unusual auctions.It’s from our Beeminder developer chatroom, in which lives a chatbot that helps mediate the auctions:

    D: /bid with @bee for skate in with keys    Bot: Ok, collecting bids from: @bee, @dreev    Bot: Bidding complete! Here are the bids: @bee: 8, @dreev: 45    D: /roll 10     Bot: 1  [we upgraded the bot in the meantime so the dice rolling to determine          payment is built in]    D: !!    D: now i have to pay bee $80 [$8*10] to not skate her the keys    D: done    Aaron: so confused    D: we can explain if you'd like!    D: here's a hypothetical normal-person equivalent of what just happened:        "i forgot my keys, any chance you were going to skate in soon?"        "i wasn't going to but i could, because i love you!"        "that's ok, honey, i'm fine at this coffee shop till my next appointment,        when i was going to come home anyway"        "well, ok, i'll let you fend for yourself. i'll clean the bathroom to make        it up to you."    D: so the bids replace the feeling each other out -- "i *could* skate in",        "that's ok", etc. -- and the payment replaces the "i'll make it up to you"    Uluc: Ok, I committed the change. It might be best if you took a look at the           source in case I screwed something obvious up. app/models/goal.rb line 197    D: /bid with @bee for deploying uluc's code    Bot: Ok, collecting bids from: @bee, @dreev    [nerd discussion about beeminder code redacted]    Bot: Bidding complete! Here are the bids: @bee: 0, @dreev: 10    [bethany deploys the code]    Aaron: do those bids mean bee doesn't care, and dreev was more willing to            pay $10 than to deploy?    B: yes    D: right    D: did my normal-person equivalent make sense?    Aaron: sort of yes    D: we think of it as mathematically equivalent to me *halfway* skating        bethany the keys. i could've just done it cuz i'm nice, or she could've        just refused the favor cuz she's nice. instead we made it a 50/50 joint        decision for which outcome would happen so it's like half a favor. and        more importantly, it ensures the favor only happens if it's socially        efficient for the favor to happen     B: also, the "hey, i forgot my keys. were you planning to skate in today?"        "Not really, maybe." "Oh, well I was planning to come home after this        appointment anyway..." all did happen behind the scenes. but instead of        continuing that back and forth for another few iterations we stopped        there and yootled.

Q2. What’s the real story on auctions for sex?

It was true when we told the NBCnews reporter that we don’t.But then after that we thought, what the heck.It turned out to be super boring, because we’re both super easy.So technically we have now, but there weren’t conflicting preferences so money hasn’t changed hands.Not that there would be anything wrong with that!

Footnotes

[1]We’re keeping a list of links to all the latest in the ongoing media frenzy inan addendum to Bethany Soule’s original article.

[2]Sharad’s Messy Matters posts, on the other hand, are mostly about society and public policy and Big Data.Things like forecasting elections and diversity on the web.

[3]Basically our response to every reporter who wanted to jump on thiswas “if you let us talk about Beeminder we’ll pretty much debaseourselves in any way you’d like!”