wallet

i found a louis vuitton wallet outside the gym today.

(it irks me when things like that happen. if i ever lose my wallet, especially in west philly, i just know that it's going to be picked up my some schmoe who will proceed to spend the cash on crack and throw everything else away. i expect that, not because i'm a cynic, but because of statistics; there are just more schmoes than non-schmoes. it's the asymmetry that irritates me. if you're the kind of person who would not return a wallet you found on the street, then you're not going to be as annoyed when no one returns yours, because that's your worldview -- you would have done the same. on the other hand, if you're the kind of person who wouldn't think twice about turning in a wallet, you're unhappy even if you are aware of the odds, because others are not doing unto you as you would have done unto them. there's an inherent unfairness which doesn't get rectified, unless you believe in karma, in which case i have some tea leaves i'd like you to read.)

anyway, i searched the wallet to try and get the name and address of its owner, and found two things of interest: (1) a licence to carry firearms, and (2) a handwritten note from his girlfriend saying (among other things) that they had won a significant amount of money in the lottery, and that she was giving him the ticket so that he could go claim the winnings. ok. no lottery ticket in the wallet, though, which fortunately relieved me from a rather terrible moral quandry. (honestly, what would you do if you found a wallet with a ticket worth, say, half a million dollars in it? isn't that the kind of thing that only happens in movies? which reminds me, a simple plan is a pretty good film on just that subject.)

the next thought that crossed my mind was: this is a little suspicious. who writes notes like that? and where else would you keep a lottery ticket besides your wallet? the situation was beginning to resemble hornstein's famous experiment*, where they left wallets with letters in them (from a "previous finder") all around new york to see whether similarity between previous and current finder led to a greater likelihood of a wallet being returned. the wallet was right outside pottruck, the amount of money in it was about right, and it seemed like the perfect manipulation to make you less likely to return it (less cognitive dissonance because: "bah, he doesn't need the money anyway.") i was about two blocks away from the gym by the time this occurred to me, and i considered going back to look for an undergraduate surreptitiously taking notes across the street in an unmarked van, but by that time i was hungry and very near the curry shop and decided that i was being ridiculous.

over briyani, i considered this further. if i really did believe that the whole affair was a setup, should i keep the money? i've done lab experiments before that involve the dictator game, which i'll let wikipedia describe because i'm tired of typing.

In the dictator game, the first player, "the proposer," determines an allocation (split) of some endowment (such as a cash prize). The second player, the "responder," simply receives the remainder of the endowment not allocated by the proposer to himself. The responder's role is entirely passive (he has no strategic input into the outcome of the game). As a result, the dictator game is not formally a game at all (as the term is used in game theory). To be a game, every player's outcome must depend on the actions of at least some others. Since the proposer's outcome depends only on his own actions, this situation is one of decision theory and not game theory. Despite this formal point, the dictator game is used in the game theory literature as a degenerate game.

This "game" has been used to test the homo economicus model of individual behavior: if individuals were only concerned with their own economic well being, proposers (acting as dictators) would allocate the entire good to themselves and give nothing to the responder. Experimental results have indicated that individuals often allocate money to the responders, reducing the amount of money they receive. These results appear robust, Henrich, et al. discovered in a wide cross cultural study that proposers do allocate a non-zero share of the endowment to the responder.

i can tell you that the feeling of wanting to share the money is very compelling, but knowing the literature has completely hardened my heart, and on the two occasions i've had to play this (both times i was the proposer, luckily, enough), i kept everything (which is the normative thing to do). wouldn't this be an analogous case if i believed it were an experiment? i re-read the note, and looked through the rest of the wallet (business cards, check card, health insurance, supermarket discount card), and decided that if it were fake, it was nevertheless very convincing. ah, well. the powerball jackpot is at $275 million this weekend. maybe i'll get in on some of that action on my own.

* you need to have APA subscription to access the full article, unfortunately, but e-mail me if you want it.