I think the point of the OP is not to encourage people to go to physical restaurants, but to discourage the use of online delivery services relative to other ways of placing orders . As they write (boldfaced added):
If you like the restaurant and want those working there to earn a living, and the place to continue to exist, do not order via online services like SeamlessWeb, GrubHub, Delivery.com or Caviar, if there is another way to contact the restaurant.
I do find the post confusing in certain ways; for example, the following quote expresses a view which I find hard to understand, let alone agree with:
If you would cost your local place $5 to save the cost of a fifteen second phone call, make no mistake. You are defecting. You are playing zero-sum games with those who should be your allies. You are bad, and you should feel bad.
Ah, I see. Yeah, I am also not a counterfactual customer who would have ever called them. Before the onset of “standard internet food delivery” I never ordered food, and in the absence of the convenience of that system, would just stop ordering food from any of the restaurants. As such, I am happy to subsidize and give a lot of money to food delivery companies, which seem to actually have created a highly valuable service to me (more so than any individual restaurant ever has for me).
I don’t find that view hard to understand or hard to agree with. I wonder whether we’re interpreting that passage differently from one another. Here’s what I take it to mean:
“To value 15 seconds of _your_ time more than $5 of _the local pizza place’s_ money is to be excessively selfish. If you cost them $5 to save yourself 15s, then you are making the world a substantially worse place on net for a trifling benefit to yourself. Decent people do not do that, and if you do it you should feel bad about it.”
I can totally understand how someone might disagree with that (way 1: “yes, I really do care that much more about myself than about random other people, and I don’t see any reason why I should be ashamed of that”; way 2: “in this situation the local restaurant has clearly decided that they don’t mind getting $5 less in order to save their customer a phone call and hence make it more likely that they get that customer at all, and if they’re OK with that decision I don’t see why I shouldn’t be”) but it seems clearly reasonable to me.
The view you articulate is perfectly intelligible. I’m just not sure it corresponds to the view expressed in the OP. Why invoke notions like defection, if all you want to say is that you should not impose a great cost on others when you can do so at a small cost to yourself?
Why invoke notions like defection, if all you want to say is that you should not impose a great cost on others when you can do so at a small cost to yourself?
I do observe that this is actually what defection is in the canonical game theory sense.
(No comment on whether or how that should apply to the current discussion)
In game theory, the costs and benefits in terms of which defection is defined occur in a well-defined context of strategic interaction. My objection was to the use of defection in a way that implied that the situation described in the post had a particular game-theoretic structure, when in fact no clear account was given of what that structure was supposed to be.
I think the point of the OP is not to encourage people to go to physical restaurants, but to discourage the use of online delivery services relative to other ways of placing orders . As they write (boldfaced added):
I do find the post confusing in certain ways; for example, the following quote expresses a view which I find hard to understand, let alone agree with:
Ah, I see. Yeah, I am also not a counterfactual customer who would have ever called them. Before the onset of “standard internet food delivery” I never ordered food, and in the absence of the convenience of that system, would just stop ordering food from any of the restaurants. As such, I am happy to subsidize and give a lot of money to food delivery companies, which seem to actually have created a highly valuable service to me (more so than any individual restaurant ever has for me).
I don’t find that view hard to understand or hard to agree with. I wonder whether we’re interpreting that passage differently from one another. Here’s what I take it to mean:
“To value 15 seconds of _your_ time more than $5 of _the local pizza place’s_ money is to be excessively selfish. If you cost them $5 to save yourself 15s, then you are making the world a substantially worse place on net for a trifling benefit to yourself. Decent people do not do that, and if you do it you should feel bad about it.”
I can totally understand how someone might disagree with that (way 1: “yes, I really do care that much more about myself than about random other people, and I don’t see any reason why I should be ashamed of that”; way 2: “in this situation the local restaurant has clearly decided that they don’t mind getting $5 less in order to save their customer a phone call and hence make it more likely that they get that customer at all, and if they’re OK with that decision I don’t see why I shouldn’t be”) but it seems clearly reasonable to me.
The view you articulate is perfectly intelligible. I’m just not sure it corresponds to the view expressed in the OP. Why invoke notions like defection, if all you want to say is that you should not impose a great cost on others when you can do so at a small cost to yourself?
I do observe that this is actually what defection is in the canonical game theory sense.
(No comment on whether or how that should apply to the current discussion)
In game theory, the costs and benefits in terms of which defection is defined occur in a well-defined context of strategic interaction. My objection was to the use of defection in a way that implied that the situation described in the post had a particular game-theoretic structure, when in fact no clear account was given of what that structure was supposed to be.