if you have some trait things would be better for you if it was as common as possible.
Only for deficiencies and tastes. Unusual abilities, however, give you comparative advantage. To the extent that unusual tastes lead to unusual abilities, having a rare taste can also be beneficial.
I think this often isn’t true of tastes either? If I have a strong preference to live in housing near the waterfront, I am better off if this preference is rare so housing near the waterfront costs the same as housing elsewhere, whereas if the preference is common then housing near the waterfront will be much more expensive. (If it’s sufficiently expensive then high-rise apartment buildings will be developed near the waterfront but the rent per square meter will still be higher than elsehwere.) It would be bad for me if a strong preference against living near the waterfront were so common that no housing or infrastructure were built there at all, but it’s best for me if most people are indifferent or merely weakly disprefer it. Similar considerations apply in many other competitive markets.
Can you think of any example which doesn’t have exceptionally low elasticity of supply? I can imagine such a situation for goods with no supply elasticity (ie, land, certain kinds of collectors’ items) but not for the vast majority of goods.
I think low elasticity of supply situations are pretty common, and notably it doesn’t have to be completely inelastic the way waterfront land is. For example if your taste in vacation-destination weather is unusual you can usually get cheaper flights. Flight supply isn’t totally inelastic, many flight routes are seasonal or see more service in summer, but it’s nontheless consistently much cheaper to fly between the US and Europe in February than in August.
I think there are also examples around achieving high job security with low effort by happily doing tasks that your coworkers all strongly prefer not to do, and this can happen even if your employer’s demand for those tasks is somewhat elastic. And in homosexual and bisexual dating contexts with complementary preferences (e.g. top vs bottom), if you prefer bottom you are generally better off if more other people prefer top and vice versa, even if there are enough “vers” people that the “supply” in both directions is fairly elastic.
The other major exception I can think of is with regards to antisocial behaviour. If you are a habitual liar, for instance, it is in your best interest for the people you interact with to think as few people lie as possible; that way they won’t be on guard against you lying to them. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone try to argue that antisocial behaviour they exhibit is rare, though. It seems like the urge to excuse antisocial behaviour by claiming that “everyone does it” is way way stronger.
I would’ve expected heterosexuality (&c.) to be an exception. You want your complements to underestimate the odds they can find someone better than you, which suggests pushing the narrative that you’re rare (and they’re abundant).
Suppose that I’m a redhead, along with 10% of the female population, and I want the most attractive possible man to date me (assuming for the sake of the simplicity that everyone agrees on who the most attractive people are, and everyone knows how attractive they are too, etc. etc., as is typical in matching problems). I’m a 50th percentile woman myself. Say that 10% of men near-exclusively want to date redheads, they know this, and the rest don’t at all. Men rate women with their preference of hair higher than all women without it (but otherwise match the general attractiveness rankings; i.e. a man who prefers redheads prefers me to 95% of other women). In the equilibrium with full knowledge for all participants, everyone matches with their counterpart at precisely their level of attractiveness and kind of hair/hair preference (I think this strategy is the only rationalisable strategy by weak dominance, but it’s not the only NE; at the very least the silly equilibrium with all players matching on the first round is a NE).
If I meet a man in the most attractive 1%, and I can convince him that redheads are extremely rare, say 0.1% of the population, I would be able to convince him to date me (since 0.1% of the male population is both more attractive than him and attracted to redheads, and he should expect them to snatch up the female redhead population; a 50th percentile redhead is much better than he can hope for). So it seems like convincing such men that I’m rare would benefit me. But let’s suppose instead that I can press a button to make every man think that redheads are 0.1% of the population. Does this help me? Well, again, if I meet a man in the most attractive 1% who is still single, I’ll be able to convince him to date me. But the chance I will ever meet such a man is very low, since any other redheaded woman can also convince such a man to date them! By a symmetry argument (ie, any strategy I can take, other women can too: the expected quality of dates among all redheads can’t be improved by this and my 50th percentile attractiveness dooms me to a median expected payoff) we can see that my expected match can’t be improved by pressing this button. And indeed my expected match becomes worse: 9.9% of men prefer redheads but believe that they cannot date one, so will consent (if they see a non-redhead of the appropriate attractiveness) to match with a non-redhead. Thus the expected quality of dates among redheaded women decreases, and my expected date quality is worse (also, some non-redhead-prefering men will never match).
So I don’t think it usually helps me to make men falsely believe that I’m rare, since my competition benefits just as much as I do and it makes the average outcome worse for all of us (there are probably ways you can make the numbers work out for the button being better, but I think you’d have to try moderately hard).
On the other hand, if I somehow convince all men that 99.9% of women are redheaded, then my position is improved, since the position of non-redheaded women is made worse (some non-redhead-preferers will accept a redheaded woman, and no redhead preferers will accept a non-redheaded woman) and my position is made better in equal proportion. This is assuming that traits are entirely immutable; if we reverse it and talk about a redhead-preferring man pressing a button that convinces all women that all men like redheads, then the same logic applies and also some women may dye their hair. This effect (people changing their presentation to match what they perceive as common tastes) is the one I wrote the post about.
Only for deficiencies and tastes. Unusual abilities, however, give you comparative advantage. To the extent that unusual tastes lead to unusual abilities, having a rare taste can also be beneficial.
I think this often isn’t true of tastes either? If I have a strong preference to live in housing near the waterfront, I am better off if this preference is rare so housing near the waterfront costs the same as housing elsewhere, whereas if the preference is common then housing near the waterfront will be much more expensive. (If it’s sufficiently expensive then high-rise apartment buildings will be developed near the waterfront but the rent per square meter will still be higher than elsehwere.) It would be bad for me if a strong preference against living near the waterfront were so common that no housing or infrastructure were built there at all, but it’s best for me if most people are indifferent or merely weakly disprefer it. Similar considerations apply in many other competitive markets.
Can you think of any example which doesn’t have exceptionally low elasticity of supply? I can imagine such a situation for goods with no supply elasticity (ie, land, certain kinds of collectors’ items) but not for the vast majority of goods.
I think low elasticity of supply situations are pretty common, and notably it doesn’t have to be completely inelastic the way waterfront land is. For example if your taste in vacation-destination weather is unusual you can usually get cheaper flights. Flight supply isn’t totally inelastic, many flight routes are seasonal or see more service in summer, but it’s nontheless consistently much cheaper to fly between the US and Europe in February than in August.
I think there are also examples around achieving high job security with low effort by happily doing tasks that your coworkers all strongly prefer not to do, and this can happen even if your employer’s demand for those tasks is somewhat elastic. And in homosexual and bisexual dating contexts with complementary preferences (e.g. top vs bottom), if you prefer bottom you are generally better off if more other people prefer top and vice versa, even if there are enough “vers” people that the “supply” in both directions is fairly elastic.
Good point. However, I think in most such cases the advantage of having more of a market trying to cater to your interests outweighs the extra demand.
Notably, you can’t easily make more waterfront land.
Yeah, ability is one of the exceptions.
The other major exception I can think of is with regards to antisocial behaviour. If you are a habitual liar, for instance, it is in your best interest for the people you interact with to think as few people lie as possible; that way they won’t be on guard against you lying to them. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone try to argue that antisocial behaviour they exhibit is rare, though. It seems like the urge to excuse antisocial behaviour by claiming that “everyone does it” is way way stronger.
I would’ve expected heterosexuality (&c.) to be an exception. You want your complements to underestimate the odds they can find someone better than you, which suggests pushing the narrative that you’re rare (and they’re abundant).
I’m not sure this holds.
Suppose that I’m a redhead, along with 10% of the female population, and I want the most attractive possible man to date me (assuming for the sake of the simplicity that everyone agrees on who the most attractive people are, and everyone knows how attractive they are too, etc. etc., as is typical in matching problems). I’m a 50th percentile woman myself. Say that 10% of men near-exclusively want to date redheads, they know this, and the rest don’t at all. Men rate women with their preference of hair higher than all women without it (but otherwise match the general attractiveness rankings; i.e. a man who prefers redheads prefers me to 95% of other women). In the equilibrium with full knowledge for all participants, everyone matches with their counterpart at precisely their level of attractiveness and kind of hair/hair preference (I think this strategy is the only rationalisable strategy by weak dominance, but it’s not the only NE; at the very least the silly equilibrium with all players matching on the first round is a NE).
If I meet a man in the most attractive 1%, and I can convince him that redheads are extremely rare, say 0.1% of the population, I would be able to convince him to date me (since 0.1% of the male population is both more attractive than him and attracted to redheads, and he should expect them to snatch up the female redhead population; a 50th percentile redhead is much better than he can hope for). So it seems like convincing such men that I’m rare would benefit me. But let’s suppose instead that I can press a button to make every man think that redheads are 0.1% of the population. Does this help me? Well, again, if I meet a man in the most attractive 1% who is still single, I’ll be able to convince him to date me. But the chance I will ever meet such a man is very low, since any other redheaded woman can also convince such a man to date them! By a symmetry argument (ie, any strategy I can take, other women can too: the expected quality of dates among all redheads can’t be improved by this and my 50th percentile attractiveness dooms me to a median expected payoff) we can see that my expected match can’t be improved by pressing this button. And indeed my expected match becomes worse: 9.9% of men prefer redheads but believe that they cannot date one, so will consent (if they see a non-redhead of the appropriate attractiveness) to match with a non-redhead. Thus the expected quality of dates among redheaded women decreases, and my expected date quality is worse (also, some non-redhead-prefering men will never match).
So I don’t think it usually helps me to make men falsely believe that I’m rare, since my competition benefits just as much as I do and it makes the average outcome worse for all of us (there are probably ways you can make the numbers work out for the button being better, but I think you’d have to try moderately hard).
On the other hand, if I somehow convince all men that 99.9% of women are redheaded, then my position is improved, since the position of non-redheaded women is made worse (some non-redhead-preferers will accept a redheaded woman, and no redhead preferers will accept a non-redheaded woman) and my position is made better in equal proportion. This is assuming that traits are entirely immutable; if we reverse it and talk about a redhead-preferring man pressing a button that convinces all women that all men like redheads, then the same logic applies and also some women may dye their hair. This effect (people changing their presentation to match what they perceive as common tastes) is the one I wrote the post about.