(Published in Business Mirror under the Mirror Image Column, January 5, 2011)
I attended the silver reunion of Batch ’85 of the Manila Science High School on December 29. The ice-breaker the organizers ran was a rock-paper-scissors (RPS) game. This entailed pairs from the 30-plus who attended the reunion to run one round of RPS, with the loser giving P20 to the winner. The winners in the previous rounds were then pitted against each other, and the winnings were given to the victor of the succeeding rounds, until finally there was just one big winner with over P1,000 in prize money.
Being a confessed ex-geek, I knew there was a strategy in this game and not pure chance. I read some studies on RPS that the most likely choice of a player was scissors. So my strategy was to always choose rock in the first round.
True enough, during the game, I won several times using the rock strategy, until finally only Jude, a batchmate, and I were left. Unluckily, I succumbed to my opponent’s superior strategy that countered mine. But it was fun, nonetheless.
RPS is a classic game that children and adults play to resolve conflicts and disagreements by leaving the decision to chance. It reminded me of a scene from The Simpsons wherein Bart and Lisa were going to play RPS for the last cupcake. Lisa, thinking: “Poor, simple Bart. Always throws rock every time.” Bart, thinking: “Rock! Good ol’ rock! Nothing beats rock.”
However frivolous it may seem, history and modern society are rife with examples of serious RPS matches. George Washington and the British general, Lord Cornwallis, were reputed to have lost to the French military officer, Comte de Rochambeau, in an RPS match to decide who would be the last to leave Cornwallis’s tent after the signing of the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781.
In 2005 a Japanese electronics tycoon forced the giant auction houses, Christie’s and Sotheby’s, to play rock-paper-scissors to decide who would auction his company’s $17.8-million art collection. Christie’s consulted the 11-year-old twin daughters of an employee, who suggested scissors, because “everybody expects you to choose rock.” Christie’s won the contract.
Another example in 2006, a Florida judge ordered two attorneys to play RPS when they could not agree on where to hold a deposition, even though their offices were a few floors apart in the same building.
The foregoing illustrations may seem like strange ways of settling conflicts, but there is wisdom in RPS. In fact, these examples are rationalized in the book Rock, Paper, Scissors—Game Theory in Everyday Life by Len Fisher, where the author prescribes variants of RPS in conflict resolution. The reason is that the game is played with no dominant strategy among the players. Thus, situations that seem to be at an impasse (for instance too many free-riders in overfishing) can be resolved by adding strategies and changing them to rock-paper-scissors situations.
One application is in social traps—situations in which a group of people act to obtain short-term individual gains, which in the long run lead to a loss for the group as a whole. An example of a social trap is overfishing (paper approach), which results in the loss for the community (rock move which is beaten by paper). By introducing a third approach of volunteerism (scissors approach) among community members to fight overfishing, it reduces the size of the community that allows this to happen; hence, forcing the overfishers to eventually stop.
Now, this is not to suggest that we use RPS in major decisions that we make. There are various superior conflict resolution and decision-making approaches available. But RPS represents the realism and metaphor of the fun, as well as serious levels of strategy and decision- making in everyday life, and as such deserves some attention on the following grounds.
First, RPS embodies the human aspiration for fairness in dealings with each other. Since the players are in control in choosing their moves, the outcome is perceived as fair and acceptable.
Second, laughable as it may seem, RPS can, indeed, be used as an approach to break an impasse but requires skill. As the World RPS Society avers, playing the game is a more complex combination of strategy, skill and observation.
Last, RPS represents a dichotomy of decisions that we face every day—from serious business decisions to the mundane “fighting over the last cupcake.” It’s the stark contrast between the sober and the silly, which makes life more interesting and exciting.
As we welcome the New Year, we will be again facing rock-paper-scissors situations in our lives. Let’s make it more exciting.
****
Reynaldo C. Lugtu Jr. teaches strategy, management and marketing courses in the MBA Program of De La Salle University, Graduate School of Business. He may be e-mailed at rlugtu2002@yahoo.com or visit his blog at http://rlugtu.blogspot.com.
I attended the silver reunion of Batch ’85 of the Manila Science High School on December 29. The ice-breaker the organizers ran was a rock-paper-scissors (RPS) game. This entailed pairs from the 30-plus who attended the reunion to run one round of RPS, with the loser giving P20 to the winner. The winners in the previous rounds were then pitted against each other, and the winnings were given to the victor of the succeeding rounds, until finally there was just one big winner with over P1,000 in prize money.
Being a confessed ex-geek, I knew there was a strategy in this game and not pure chance. I read some studies on RPS that the most likely choice of a player was scissors. So my strategy was to always choose rock in the first round.
True enough, during the game, I won several times using the rock strategy, until finally only Jude, a batchmate, and I were left. Unluckily, I succumbed to my opponent’s superior strategy that countered mine. But it was fun, nonetheless.
RPS is a classic game that children and adults play to resolve conflicts and disagreements by leaving the decision to chance. It reminded me of a scene from The Simpsons wherein Bart and Lisa were going to play RPS for the last cupcake. Lisa, thinking: “Poor, simple Bart. Always throws rock every time.” Bart, thinking: “Rock! Good ol’ rock! Nothing beats rock.”
However frivolous it may seem, history and modern society are rife with examples of serious RPS matches. George Washington and the British general, Lord Cornwallis, were reputed to have lost to the French military officer, Comte de Rochambeau, in an RPS match to decide who would be the last to leave Cornwallis’s tent after the signing of the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781.
In 2005 a Japanese electronics tycoon forced the giant auction houses, Christie’s and Sotheby’s, to play rock-paper-scissors to decide who would auction his company’s $17.8-million art collection. Christie’s consulted the 11-year-old twin daughters of an employee, who suggested scissors, because “everybody expects you to choose rock.” Christie’s won the contract.
Another example in 2006, a Florida judge ordered two attorneys to play RPS when they could not agree on where to hold a deposition, even though their offices were a few floors apart in the same building.
The foregoing illustrations may seem like strange ways of settling conflicts, but there is wisdom in RPS. In fact, these examples are rationalized in the book Rock, Paper, Scissors—Game Theory in Everyday Life by Len Fisher, where the author prescribes variants of RPS in conflict resolution. The reason is that the game is played with no dominant strategy among the players. Thus, situations that seem to be at an impasse (for instance too many free-riders in overfishing) can be resolved by adding strategies and changing them to rock-paper-scissors situations.
One application is in social traps—situations in which a group of people act to obtain short-term individual gains, which in the long run lead to a loss for the group as a whole. An example of a social trap is overfishing (paper approach), which results in the loss for the community (rock move which is beaten by paper). By introducing a third approach of volunteerism (scissors approach) among community members to fight overfishing, it reduces the size of the community that allows this to happen; hence, forcing the overfishers to eventually stop.
Now, this is not to suggest that we use RPS in major decisions that we make. There are various superior conflict resolution and decision-making approaches available. But RPS represents the realism and metaphor of the fun, as well as serious levels of strategy and decision- making in everyday life, and as such deserves some attention on the following grounds.
First, RPS embodies the human aspiration for fairness in dealings with each other. Since the players are in control in choosing their moves, the outcome is perceived as fair and acceptable.
Second, laughable as it may seem, RPS can, indeed, be used as an approach to break an impasse but requires skill. As the World RPS Society avers, playing the game is a more complex combination of strategy, skill and observation.
Last, RPS represents a dichotomy of decisions that we face every day—from serious business decisions to the mundane “fighting over the last cupcake.” It’s the stark contrast between the sober and the silly, which makes life more interesting and exciting.
As we welcome the New Year, we will be again facing rock-paper-scissors situations in our lives. Let’s make it more exciting.
****
Reynaldo C. Lugtu Jr. teaches strategy, management and marketing courses in the MBA Program of De La Salle University, Graduate School of Business. He may be e-mailed at rlugtu2002@yahoo.com or visit his blog at http://rlugtu.blogspot.com.
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