Superrational

“Will Vicktoreya Keyneslee Beauxpensees please come see the principal right now?” said the voice over the intercom.

The voice didn’t actually tell me where to go, but I met the principal at his office anyway, because I knew that was the Schelling point for where we could find each other. I pushed my luxuriant raven hair behind my ear demurely and used my delicate, doll-like hand to knock on the door.

During the three seconds I spent waiting for it to open, I thought sadly about how I’d never known my parents. They’d died when I was a baby, gored in a stag hunt. Instead, I’d been raised by a series of mysterious guardians. But everybody always sensed there was something different about me. While the other children played their foolish games, I would twirl my luxuriant raven hair and draw Laffer curves in sidewalk chalk. Even though people were constantly falling in love with me, I kept to myself because I was so absorbed in my daydreams of a result definitively demonstrating whether the natural growth rate of capital production was exogenous or endogenous to demand.

I was snapped out of my wistful reverie when the principal opened the door. In front of his desk sat the most popular girl in school, Ariela Nudge.

“Ariela tells me you tried to take the locker she’d been using all year and dismissed her preferences for it as ‘reference-dependent,’” the principal said to me.

“She was taking advantage of the absence of a market system with enforceable property rights to sabotage allocative efficiency!”

“Fine,” said the principal. “My stomach is rumbling because it's almost lunchtime, so I'm going to be extra hard on the two of you.

“I’ll speak to you each separately. If neither of you confesses to wrongdoing, I’ll give you both detention today. If you both confess, I’ll give you detention today and tomorrow. If one of you confesses but the other doesn’t, the one who confessed will go free and the other will get detention for a week.”

I computed all the outcomes very fast in my elegant, doelike head. If Ariela and I cooperated to both deny wrongdoing, then we would both get detention for just one day. But if she didn’t confess, it would be even better for me to confess and go free. And if she did confess, defecting on me, then it would also be best for me to confess to avoid a week’s detention. School was out later that month, so we wouldn’t have much of a chance to get back at each other. The only equilibrium was for us to both confess, so naturally that’s what I did.

But Ariela denied everything. “Ugh, Vicktoreya! Why would you act so unfairly!” she squealed when she learned she’d be staying after school all week.

I sighed. I had almost resigned myself to detention; that way at least I wouldn’t get made fun of for not going to watch the stupid zero-sum lacrosse game. But I knew it was in both of our best interests for her to learn her lesson. “Every reasonable person knows you don’t play tit-for-tat in a one-off.”

“That’s enough from you two,” the principal said. He turned to his secretary. “Will you please fill out the paperwork for Ariela’s punishment and give Vicktoreya a little talking-to?”

But as soon as he had left the room, the principal’s secretary said, “Never mind the detention, Ariela. You can go. Just keep your nose clean next time.”

Ariela skipped out the door back to class.

The secretary turned to me. “It’s hard for a principal to ensure that an agent acting on his behalf will carry out his will in a manner aligned with his incentives, isn’t it? But of course, you knew that already. Anyway, have a seat. I have something very important to tell you.”

She flipped off her hood. She was actually my mysterious guardian, Emhily, in disguise.

“Vicktoreya Keyneslee Beauxpensees, there’s something special that makes you different from all your peers. You parents were no mere Homo sapiens, and neither are you.”

My mysterious eyes shone with feeling seen.

“You are one of the last living members of Homo economicus, the mythical race of perfectly rational utility-maximizing economic agents.”

I gasped, covering my dainty mouth with the sharp sparkly nails on my slender fingers. “You mean I’m… I’m a tradeoff-talking rational economic person, or TOTREP?”

“Please don’t tell your classmates,” Emhily cautioned wisely. “Because of their status quo bias, they’ll assign undue psychological weight to your increased status and generate positional externalities.”

---

It was all I could do to contain my secret for the rest of the school day. As soon as the bell rang, I knew where I was headed: off to the mall to exchange monetary payment for the bundle of goods I deemed preferable to all others.

But when I turned around from picking out the blood-red lipstick that would most perfectly complement my porcelain skin and ethereally melancholy eyes, in strutted Ariela and her clique of western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic preppies. I ducked behind a shelf.

“I love those shoes on you,” Ariela was saying to her best friend, Blinklynn Neucoque.

“I’ll probably go with them, then,” Blinklynn said. 

I almost spilled my consumer surplus all over the floor. Imagine making a purchasing decision under the influence of herd mentality! Munching on my two marshmallows from the food court, I listened to Blinklynn go on.

“Where’s the price tag? I’d get these if they’re under like 80.”

“It says they’re thirty percent off online,” Ariela said. “Oh – but they take a week to ship.”

“And prom is Friday.”

The horror of having a temporal discounting function that was not only nonexponential but also discontinuous was too much for me to take. With a shudder, I went back to meticulously filling out the table in my notebook of the price and characteristics of every item in the store.

---

Friday rolled around: the big night. I didn’t have a date because nobody had shown up to my Gale-Shapley matchmaking session, but it didn’t matter because I looked ravishing in my dramatic lipstick, heavy eyeliner, exquisite dress, hair that I didn’t even have to style because it always fell perfectly, and shoes I cleverly picked out because they wouldn’t even be visible under the dress and I have a very low time preference and prom is only 0.0004% of my life so I’d just grabbed the cheapest ones on the rack.

Unfortunately, pretty soon my feet started to hurt. But I remembered that Blinklynn had clearly stated she valued her shoes at $80, so I went up and offered her $80. She refused. I was horrified.

“Your willingness to pay should equal your willingness to accept!” I protested.

“But then I wouldn’t have any shoes!”

“$95, to factor in transportation costs and compensate you for your assumption of risk?”

“You have lipstick on your teeth.”

Before I could sputter out a response, a mysterious stranger swept me off my feet.

---

Cradled in his sculpted arms, I turned to see his face. It was the most beautiful boy I'd ever seen in my life. "Hi, I'm Nashwell Maxington," he said. "I'm new here. I hope you don't mind me rescuing you, but I couldn't believe such a lovely girl with such luxuriant raven hair could have been victimized by others’ vulnerability to the endowment effect."

I gazed into his breathtakingly dark eyes. There was something deep and familiar about them, glimmering in his eye sockets like two spherical cows. Was it... could it be?

"I'm Vicktoreya Keyneslee Beauxpensees," I said. "An average blue whale weighs two hundred thousand pounds. How much do you think I weigh?"

He laughed. "Not more than a hundred pounds sopping wet."

A delighted shiver passed through my itty bitty little waist and ran down my spine.

"Anchoring has no effect on me," Nashwell said, "and judging by the fact that you tried, I think I know what you are." His voice dropped to a whisper. "I'm a Homo economicus too."

I gasped. "I thought I'd never meet another like me."

Nashwell smiled rationally. "Let me relieve you of these sunk costs." He slipped the shoes off my feet and beckoned me to dance.

We reached our saturation point of music consumption after one song. He took my hand and led me out the door for a moonlit stroll, where we walked and talked for hours. The transaction costs incurred by our interpersonal negotiations were infinitesimal; it felt magical.

But then Nashwell got a depressed look on his face.

"What's wrong?" I said.

"Vicktoreya, I'm smitten by your effortless good looks, outlier IQ, and captivating allure. I observe evidence that you may reciprocate my affections, but I can't generalize from this small sample, lest I fall prey to the fallacious law of small numbers. Most people hallucinate patterns in stochastic noise, but I could never allow myself to be fooled by randomness like that."

He paused to brood axiomatically and self-consistently.

"By the trivial rules of conjunction," he lamented, "it’s more likely that you’re beautiful, charming, brilliant, and swooning every time I speak than that you’re beautiful, charming, brilliant, swooning every time I speak, and in love with me.”

"Oh, Nashwell!" I exclaimed, deeply moved. "Forty-nine percent of the fibers of my being want to fall in love with you. But I can't let myself fall for you, because it would be irrational for my present self to allow my future self to vastly alter its value distribution away from my current one."

A ray of moonlight suddenly broke through the trees and shone dazzlingly onto his chiseled face. It seemed to strike him with an insight.

"Ah, my darling!” he said. "Consider this.

“We, two perfectly rational agents, can still fail to coordinate because we each generate strategies independently of the other. But if we instead performed costly signaling by undertaking elaborate social rituals whose participants are selected for compatibility, and if we subsequently wove the threads of our two lives into one so that future changes to both our decision functions would be influenced by a roughly identical set of inputs – then, my angel, to a first approximation we would be able to avoid multipolar traps by relying on the assumption that our strategies will be the same, and hence outcompete individual actors who fail to implement this meta-coordination.

“This is what I understand the romantics call ‘true love.’”

I gazed at him longingly.

"Plus," he added, "even if I’m wrong – marriage is heavily tax-advantaged."

I updated directly into his arms. We shared a breathtakingly beautiful kiss. As we held each other, I felt Nashwell's utility function slowly start to nest into mine. I immediately came of age.

Nine months later, our beautiful baby girl was born.

---

FOUR YEARS AFTERWARD

"Galaxii is a joy to have in class," the preschool teacher said. "Cooperative, behaves appropriately – she fits in so well with her peers."

I squeezed Nashwell’s hand.

"The other day," the teacher said, "I praised her for taking just one juice box when some of the other children were sneaking two. She replied, 'If we model individuals in a shared sociocultural milieu as adapting to similar selection pressures, many stable strategies incorporate altruistic cooperation.'"

Nashwell and I beamed with pride. That was our tiny TOTREP, all right.