Familiar with the ice cream salesman paradox?

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No.

Interesting and awful.

Pretty good summary.

Are there branches of game theory that look ways of making things more optimal for consumers? For instance if the location of the crowd was unstable it might change the calculus for the vendors. Maybe we just need built-in perturbations to keep equilibrium points from being to predictable.

People acting less predictably...might be something there.

There is a concept of mixed strategy equalibria, to account for games that have probability distributions rather than fixed states each turn.

More parties than two comes with its own issues as well.

Don't know more about it than that

There's a beach, and two ice cream vendors. People will walk to the nearest one and give their business to that one. The salesman can position anywhere they like, yet the equilibrium outcome is for them to be side by side in the middle.

Often cited as why candidates campaign in the middle and close together in a two party election.

Not entirely relevant, but somewhat

Relevance is related to your 50/50 comment I guess.

Good points made too. Think the solution is a ground up sort of thing. Dare I say religion?! Haha, just pandering.

But for example, I'm inspired by the type of stuff max hillebrand writes, and maybe as more and more individuals move that way, we knock ourselves out of this local equilibrium state (the ugly politics).

Yup, my optimal strategy is to just tell as many people as I can that I vote third party. It gives them licence. If people hear it enough from different corners they will begin to believe that it can move the needle.

Ok. I am moving to a coast where I will set up ice cream stands with a delivery service and an app. The runners will stop periodically to stamp qr codes for the app in the sand. I'm putting everyone out of business.