Constrained Bliss Point

I don’t mean that dating has anything wrong with it. I am thinking: How would you reduce dating down to a solvable problem? The problem itself would probably be very hard. Like you would need dynamic programming to solve it, or it wouldn’t have a closed-form solution or something.

Here’s how I would frame The Dating Problem: You are trying to find your optimal match given a set of constraints. The constraints include imperfect information, finite time, some restrictions on preferences, etc. But the imperfect information constraint is very broad. Not only is it costly to determine information about a significant other, but it is also costly to determine your own preferences.

Let’s pin things down a bit more. Imagine a game with an open-ended number of rounds. Each round is a pairing between you and someone you’re dating (ignore how you might actually find such possible significant others for now). You are trying to 1) see if they are a good (best) fit for you, and 2) you are also trying to define your preferences regarding what would make for a best fit.

That is crazy.

I think the best strategy is where, early in the game, most of your matching is geared towards determining your preferences. Then in the later stage, your rounds become shorter, since you only need to make sure you have a good (best) match. I guess the downside is you could erroneously break up with someone in one of the early stages who you would have  been better off with. But given the constraints, it’s not like you could have known, right?

And no one ever said local optima are necessarily global optima.

I am a big fan of leftovers. When I go out to eat, the win condition is bringing some of my food home with me. I love knowing that there’s food waiting for me in the fridge, ready to be eaten at a moment’s notice.

Why is that, exactly? Well, I like to eat. I also like not having to wait to eat, especially when I’m hungry. And I don’t mind cold food. I think these are all reasonable preferences. So that helps explain why, say, a take-out burrito is much more valuable to me than the same amount of cheese, tortillas, salsa, beans, etc. that are not already assembled. It takes time to make a burrito — I can’t eat ingredients right away and get nearly as much utility.

From this I’ve started using the concept of pre-food. Food is stuff you can eat. Pre-food is stuff you will be able to eat, but not yet. A cupboard full of canned soups and vegetables, dried rice and beans, boxes of pasta and jars of tomato sauce is rife with pre-food. Pre-food is better than no food, of course, but I’d rather it be ready made and sitting waiting for me to eat.

Sometimes, as I’m wandering down the supermarket aisles, I think to myself: “Wow, look at all this pre-food.” It’s a useful distinction to me, anyway.

I think a lot about peoples’ preferences and how individuals make decisions to achieve their desired ends. Microeconomic theory touches on these sorts of questions, which I think is why I’m drawn to it. But while micro theory does some good explaining, it doesn’t go the whole way. I don’t just want a descriptive framework that maybe works good enough in most cases. I want some heuristic models that I can apply to my everyday life.

So I’m going to bastardize microeconomics and use it as I see fit. Here goes:

A rational decision maker will be better off the more malleable his preferences are. Imagine a continuum of control over one’s preferences. At one end, individuals are endowed with perfectly stable, static preferences at birth. At the other end, individuals can change their preferences however they see fit, so that only if they starve to death will their utility be less than infinite.

Now, I’m pretty sure standard utility theory presupposes stable preferences. With malleable preferences, you’re essentially optimizing two things at the same time: the mix of goods and services you purchase, and how you feel about the goods and services you purchase. That would probably lead to some pretty ridiculous maths assuming a tractable solution exists.

Behavioral economics has shown us that, no, preferences are not always pre-formed and stable. For a very cool paper on this point, try reading “Tom Sawyer and the construction of value” by Ariely, Lowenstein, and Prelec. I mean, sometimes our preferences are well-defined, like if I know I dislike strawberries. But to me the interesting case is when we are in a new situation and don’t have our preferences defined. For example: Do I like guava? I’m not sure. Allow me to assume that I do. Some other behavioral economics studies have shown that you can actually frame experiences so that you are more inclined to like (or dislike) them.

Obviously if your preferences are malleable enough, you will be happy with pretty much anything you consume. On first face this may seem like a trivial point. But I think the question “What shall I choose to consume to maximize my happiness?” is one step too far. The question instead should be “How shall I best maximize my happiness?”. Utility theory should help answer that question, I think, in as rigorous a manner as possible.

I wonder if I can formalize this idea using a neoclassical utility framework.