I intend to carry on that last post into a discussion on power (shocking, I know) but I wanted to cover something else first.
My family played a lot of cards growing up. Mostly Euchre and Canasta, though we had our own family version of two-person solitaire - contradiction though that may be. I've played card games with various other people throughout my life, and I remember playing with someone whose family basically taught them how to catch cheating. That is, family members would try to cheat...but part of the point was to see if everyone else could catch them at it. Which, when you think about it, probably makes each family member far better at spotting card cheats then I would be.
I brought that up because when everyone in a group shares an understanding of the rules in play, they can generally play happily and well with each other. Sort of like when a group plays BS, and part of the point of the game is to lie about what cards you have and try to catch others when they lie. If, however, a group of people sat down to play cards and two of them expected an honest game and two expected cheating to be part of it, then you have a recipe for trouble.
In sports, sometimes people cheat. Soccer, in particular, is known for it. Leaving aside the moral judgements (I do think cheating is bad, of course), what's interesting is that it changes the nature of the game. See, without cheating a game of soccer is about which team is better at putting the ball in the goal, and defending their goal from the other team. On a more meta level, it's also about who can recruit the most talented players and who can train them the best. So it's about athletic skill and team coordination.
Once you add cheating in the mix, however, it changes into a competition over who the best cheater is. (Or stops being a true competition at all, as teams deliberately lose for various reasons.)
People have different comfort levels for the different types of play. In Dominion, for example, certain cards attack other players in the game. At the beginning of each game the cards in play are randomly selected, and attack cards may or may not be a part of the game. If I'm playing with my father and one of my brothers, we generally just choose not to use the attack cards at all. If one of my other brothers is playing, he may decide to use them. If a friend of my first brother is playing, you can practically guarantee that any attack cards will be in play.
All of which changes the game considerably. With my first brother and my father, our games tend to be more relaxed. (We tend to prefer cooperative games anyway, like Pandemic. And although euchre and canasta are competitive, it's teams of two competing with each other.) In Dominion, we can focus mostly on building our own strategy however we want. (We're still competing, we just have an unspoken agreement to limit what sort of actions we take while we play the game).
When the attack cards are in play, we have to think about defense, as well. About how to win when someone might randomly force you to discard the cards in your deck, or force you to trade with them, or force everyone to swap random cards. That's part of why some players will deliberately use the attack cards. They think a winning strategy should take the attack cards into account, and that limiting player options by convention doesn't truly lead to winning strategies. (i.e. how can it be considered a winning strategy if you didn't have to plan for setbacks and opposition action?)
Tbh, they have a point. (Which is why I play regardless of whether the attack cards will be in use or not, though I do enjoy the less competitive gameplay when it's just family.) And again, if people are expecting to play one way and encounter someone playing another it can lead to trouble.
In some ways, the rules we choose to play under shape the game in business as well as card games. That is, businesses are 'supposed' to be about who comes up with the best widget at the lowest price. People focus a lot on who comes up with the best widget, but the lowest price has a huge impact and expands the scope of the competition in all sorts of ways.
There's a lot of debate over whether the best widget wins out, in the first place. For example, when I was younger, there was this thing called the videotape format war. Home videos were a new thing, and two competing companies were offering different products - VHS and Beta. When I first heard about this, it was in the context of someone discussing a market failure. A shoddier widget coming to dominate the market. The argument was that Beta was the better technology, and that it lost out to VHS because VHS was essentially better at dominating the market.
More recently, I learned that Beta might have had superior resolution, sound, and image but that these advantages were offset by a shorter recording time. So maybe it wasn't a market failure, maybe VHS really was the better widget in the first place. Either way, it raises some interesting questions about whether businesses are truly competing along the lines of "making the best widget", the way a soccer team competes on "scoring the most goals"...or whether the competition is along slightly different dimensions. Like who can make their sales the fastest, who can come to dominate the market the fastest, and who can grow largest and take advantage of their large size the fastest.
Okay, one more. John D. Rockefeller created Standard Oil back in the 1870s. This is a very rich topic that people still debate today, so take what I say as a very brief overview that may not contain all the facts. In other words, if it interests you read up on it further.
You could say that the oil industry competes to provide the right kind of fuel to it's customers in a reliable fashion. Oil at the cheapest production and transportation costs. That is, since the industry involves exploration (to find the oil), transportation, refining and marketing it's pretty much the entire supply chain. To us it doesn't make a big deal which gas station we fuel up at (though I still refuse to fuel up at BP because they don't seem to care enough about preventing oil spills).
When Rockefeller created Standard Oil, the price of oil was fluctuating dramatically, which had serious consequences for anyone trying to start a business. Much like with shale oil today, a business might seem profitable while oil prices were high...only to be in danger of bankruptcy when oil prices dropped and the business could no longer produce oil at a low enough cost to compete. It's one of the ironies of economics, I think, that we humans are incapable of dealing with the instability a 'true' market economy would operate under.
So anyways. Rockefeller took steps that ultimately reduced some of that uncertainty. His domination of the industry made costs, in some ways, predictable. And businesses love predictability, it makes it much easier to plan.
At the same time, his efforts to dominate the industry may have involved lowering his prices until his competitors went bankrupt or sold out (who were generally too small to last long if they tried to lower their prices in order to compete).
He did definitely get deals that smaller companies couldn't hope for (like transportation costs for railroad shipping, which he could get a better deal on given the volume of business he provided.) So his size conveyed an advantage, since he could afford to sell gas at less than production cost for long enough to drive his competitor out of business.
Should a larger size lead to a competitive advantage? Does the business that makes the best widget at the lowest cost truly win, when some businesses are able to take advantage of their size and resources to compete in ways that have nothing to do with producing a widget in the first place? That is - if one of Rockefeller's competitors had the same supply costs as he had, had the same railroad transportation deals, then would one of his competitors have actually been better? Or are we supposed to judge companies by the whole picture - product + supply chain? (which we do, since all we really know when we buy is the asking price and perceived quality of the product.)
In this day and age, producing a widget at the lowest cost also takes into account corporate financial practices. That is, hedge funds, cash flow, foreign exchange rates...all of these can reduce how much a corporation ultimately is spending and play a factor in which company has the lowest costs...
and none of them directly tie into which widget is the best quality, nor are they strictly related to production costs.
I brought all that up to point out that businesses compete over a much broader scale than just "produce the best widget". The rules we expect our economic players (i.e. businesses) to abide by shape the sort of business world we have. In addition, some businesses will tolerate different types of actions as they compete.
So what sort of game do we want to play?
My family played a lot of cards growing up. Mostly Euchre and Canasta, though we had our own family version of two-person solitaire - contradiction though that may be. I've played card games with various other people throughout my life, and I remember playing with someone whose family basically taught them how to catch cheating. That is, family members would try to cheat...but part of the point was to see if everyone else could catch them at it. Which, when you think about it, probably makes each family member far better at spotting card cheats then I would be.
I brought that up because when everyone in a group shares an understanding of the rules in play, they can generally play happily and well with each other. Sort of like when a group plays BS, and part of the point of the game is to lie about what cards you have and try to catch others when they lie. If, however, a group of people sat down to play cards and two of them expected an honest game and two expected cheating to be part of it, then you have a recipe for trouble.
In sports, sometimes people cheat. Soccer, in particular, is known for it. Leaving aside the moral judgements (I do think cheating is bad, of course), what's interesting is that it changes the nature of the game. See, without cheating a game of soccer is about which team is better at putting the ball in the goal, and defending their goal from the other team. On a more meta level, it's also about who can recruit the most talented players and who can train them the best. So it's about athletic skill and team coordination.
Once you add cheating in the mix, however, it changes into a competition over who the best cheater is. (Or stops being a true competition at all, as teams deliberately lose for various reasons.)
People have different comfort levels for the different types of play. In Dominion, for example, certain cards attack other players in the game. At the beginning of each game the cards in play are randomly selected, and attack cards may or may not be a part of the game. If I'm playing with my father and one of my brothers, we generally just choose not to use the attack cards at all. If one of my other brothers is playing, he may decide to use them. If a friend of my first brother is playing, you can practically guarantee that any attack cards will be in play.
All of which changes the game considerably. With my first brother and my father, our games tend to be more relaxed. (We tend to prefer cooperative games anyway, like Pandemic. And although euchre and canasta are competitive, it's teams of two competing with each other.) In Dominion, we can focus mostly on building our own strategy however we want. (We're still competing, we just have an unspoken agreement to limit what sort of actions we take while we play the game).
When the attack cards are in play, we have to think about defense, as well. About how to win when someone might randomly force you to discard the cards in your deck, or force you to trade with them, or force everyone to swap random cards. That's part of why some players will deliberately use the attack cards. They think a winning strategy should take the attack cards into account, and that limiting player options by convention doesn't truly lead to winning strategies. (i.e. how can it be considered a winning strategy if you didn't have to plan for setbacks and opposition action?)
Tbh, they have a point. (Which is why I play regardless of whether the attack cards will be in use or not, though I do enjoy the less competitive gameplay when it's just family.) And again, if people are expecting to play one way and encounter someone playing another it can lead to trouble.
In some ways, the rules we choose to play under shape the game in business as well as card games. That is, businesses are 'supposed' to be about who comes up with the best widget at the lowest price. People focus a lot on who comes up with the best widget, but the lowest price has a huge impact and expands the scope of the competition in all sorts of ways.
There's a lot of debate over whether the best widget wins out, in the first place. For example, when I was younger, there was this thing called the videotape format war. Home videos were a new thing, and two competing companies were offering different products - VHS and Beta. When I first heard about this, it was in the context of someone discussing a market failure. A shoddier widget coming to dominate the market. The argument was that Beta was the better technology, and that it lost out to VHS because VHS was essentially better at dominating the market.
More recently, I learned that Beta might have had superior resolution, sound, and image but that these advantages were offset by a shorter recording time. So maybe it wasn't a market failure, maybe VHS really was the better widget in the first place. Either way, it raises some interesting questions about whether businesses are truly competing along the lines of "making the best widget", the way a soccer team competes on "scoring the most goals"...or whether the competition is along slightly different dimensions. Like who can make their sales the fastest, who can come to dominate the market the fastest, and who can grow largest and take advantage of their large size the fastest.
Okay, one more. John D. Rockefeller created Standard Oil back in the 1870s. This is a very rich topic that people still debate today, so take what I say as a very brief overview that may not contain all the facts. In other words, if it interests you read up on it further.
You could say that the oil industry competes to provide the right kind of fuel to it's customers in a reliable fashion. Oil at the cheapest production and transportation costs. That is, since the industry involves exploration (to find the oil), transportation, refining and marketing it's pretty much the entire supply chain. To us it doesn't make a big deal which gas station we fuel up at (though I still refuse to fuel up at BP because they don't seem to care enough about preventing oil spills).
When Rockefeller created Standard Oil, the price of oil was fluctuating dramatically, which had serious consequences for anyone trying to start a business. Much like with shale oil today, a business might seem profitable while oil prices were high...only to be in danger of bankruptcy when oil prices dropped and the business could no longer produce oil at a low enough cost to compete. It's one of the ironies of economics, I think, that we humans are incapable of dealing with the instability a 'true' market economy would operate under.
So anyways. Rockefeller took steps that ultimately reduced some of that uncertainty. His domination of the industry made costs, in some ways, predictable. And businesses love predictability, it makes it much easier to plan.
At the same time, his efforts to dominate the industry may have involved lowering his prices until his competitors went bankrupt or sold out (who were generally too small to last long if they tried to lower their prices in order to compete).
He did definitely get deals that smaller companies couldn't hope for (like transportation costs for railroad shipping, which he could get a better deal on given the volume of business he provided.) So his size conveyed an advantage, since he could afford to sell gas at less than production cost for long enough to drive his competitor out of business.
Should a larger size lead to a competitive advantage? Does the business that makes the best widget at the lowest cost truly win, when some businesses are able to take advantage of their size and resources to compete in ways that have nothing to do with producing a widget in the first place? That is - if one of Rockefeller's competitors had the same supply costs as he had, had the same railroad transportation deals, then would one of his competitors have actually been better? Or are we supposed to judge companies by the whole picture - product + supply chain? (which we do, since all we really know when we buy is the asking price and perceived quality of the product.)
In this day and age, producing a widget at the lowest cost also takes into account corporate financial practices. That is, hedge funds, cash flow, foreign exchange rates...all of these can reduce how much a corporation ultimately is spending and play a factor in which company has the lowest costs...
and none of them directly tie into which widget is the best quality, nor are they strictly related to production costs.
I brought all that up to point out that businesses compete over a much broader scale than just "produce the best widget". The rules we expect our economic players (i.e. businesses) to abide by shape the sort of business world we have. In addition, some businesses will tolerate different types of actions as they compete.
So what sort of game do we want to play?
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