Cooperative Behavior

A friend of mine posed the following interesting question. I wondered how the glp audience would respond:

A popular university psychology professor offered an exercise to his students each semester just before the final exam. In this offer he emailed each student the choice that they could accept a 2 point extra credit addition to their final exam score or they could accept a 6 point addition.

The hitch to the offer was, that if more than 10% of the class chose the 6 point offer, none of the class would receive any extra credit points.

It turned out that over a period of several years enough students in each class justified to themselves their need or desire or right to those 6 points, that not once in those years did those choosing 6 points fall in number below the 10% required for any in the class to receive extra credit points.

1st variant

The teacher then devised an interesting variant on the exercise, which made it possible for a student to choose 0 extra credit points. For each student choosing 0 points, 1 person, randomly selected, would be eliminated from the group choosing 6 points, losing everything.

From that point on almost half of the classes qualified under the original requirement that required less than 10% of the class to opt for 6 points in order for all of the students to receive the extra credit points they selected. It even accomplished this at times with no one choosing the 0 point option.

Last Edited by Alkalurops on 11/18/2018 02:44 AM