Re: poly: How to buy shared secrets cheap

Robin;

I'll point out that people have been keeping secrets for as long as
there have been people. We would expect that some trick like the one
you are talking about would have been widely exploited long before now
if it actually worked well in the real and noisy world. I'm not going
to say it *cannot* work, but I'm skeptical. I'd like to see some solid
experiments before I'm going to believe that it works.

Perry

Robin Hanson writes:
> Alexander Chislenko writes:
> >It looks like it makes sense for each agent to assure others that
> >he doesn't sell secrets cheaply. One way to do it would be to play
> >multiple games with different partners, and have all agents keep
> >track in which games the secrets were revealed cheaply. Then the
> >reputation of each player would be calculated as an average sale
> >price of all games where this agent played. This would give all
> >agents incentives not to sell secrets cheaply.
>
> This requires that groups that have secrets reliably and credibly
> publish the fact that they have secrets, and whether or not those
> secrets are ever revealed to "snoops". Seems hard to me.
>
> Most groups with secrets would rather not admit that fact, and groups
> whose secrets have been revealed to someone, but not everyone, often
> would rather not admit that fact.
>
> Robin Hanson
> hanson@econ.berkeley.edu http://hanson.berkeley.edu/
> RWJF Health Policy Scholar, Sch. of Public Health 510-643-1884
> 140 Warren Hall, UC Berkeley, CA 94720-7360 FAX: 510-643-8614
Received on Mon Mar 2 22:48:29 1998