Asymmetrical Information

I think there are some good examples. One that comes to mind is Arab hatred of Israel and the effect it has had on Palestinians

"For me, true hatred is when, time and time again, you turn down benefits (or incur costs) to somehow harm, or avoid, another person."

An interesting perspective. I would argue that true hatred is when you receive intangible psychic utility from harming another person, irrespective of tangible costs or benefits.

In other words, both robbing Jews (= tangible monetary benefit) and blowing yourself up to kill Jews (= significant tangible cost) can be expressions of hatred. Self-harm does not, in my opinion, appear to be a necessary condition of hatred.

All of which leads to my disagreement with this statement:

"If there is a lesson which ties hatred and economics, it is that it is much more costly to hate when people are close to the object of that hatred, and transact with it regularly. In such situations the cost of hating starts being real (high), and as econ 101 says, when the cost of something increases, consumption goes down."

An interesting theory, but it has been my observation that hatred actually increases when people are close to the object of that hatred and transact with it regularly. Palestinians hate Jews not because the Jews live in Antarctica but because they live right next door. Similarly, I've met a number of people who have confessed something along the lines of "I didn't used to hate black people until I moved into a neighborhood that had a lot of them."

These observations would support the notion that hatred is the realization of intangible utility from causing harm to someone, rather than being inherently tied to the incursion of costs or rejection of benefits.

Of course, the plural of anecdote is not data, so I could be wrong.

David Friedman has an old essay that addresses stuff like this:

Economics and Evolutionary Psychology

It seems hatred has some other functions. Sure, it can be seen as a sort of ultimatium or subtle threat that a person would be willing to break certain rules in order to exact vengance.

But can't hatred also be used to socially justify abusing someone else? Think about the kid who steals from Walmart because they think Walmart is evil. The actions are done more or less in secret. Walmart doesn't know who is robbing them or why. The kid may benefit from the act, (assuming that they're unlikely to get caught.) The purpose of their hatred is to justify their unfair action. The more they believe ( or pay lip service to ) the notion that theft is wrong the more they will hate the people that they've stolen from. Hatred could be measured, perhaps, by the self-recognized social norms that people are willing to violate in order to carry out their actions.

i.e. If you believe in marital fidelity but you find benefit from cheating on your wife you'd have to hate her a lot.

While I agree there's a big leap between turning down $3 so the other guy doesn't get away with $7 and blowing yourself up to inflict harm on others, I can see how the two actions are really just extreme versions of the same human response.

The key is seeing our sense of justice as not based on logic but based on thousands/millions of years of evolution. If you buy behavioral biology (and I do, especially when it's explained by Robert Wright in Moral Animal and NonZero), our behaviors are adapted to benefit our survival (in a hunter gatherer society, since that's probably what we were doing for most of our evolution). Hunter gatherers probably didn't spend time consciously strategizing about game theory, but those who developed an instinctive sense of "fairness" or "justice" probably did better than those who were happy to always accept $1 of the $10 stick. So while you're right in saying that when we reject the $3 offer, we're setting a precedent that we're no doormat to be trifled with, my bet is for that most/all of us the logic comes second to our ingrained sense of what's fair.

Taking the next step, when that guy offers us only $3, we might not hate him, but we might think "what a jerk." If he keeps trying to get away with stuff that goes against our sense of fairness or what's right/just, we may indeed end up hating him. Taken in the extreme, a deep belief (delusional or non) that your group has been injustly suffering at the hands of another group for centuries could make you hate them enough to kill them, even if it means taking your own life.

So, yes, the injustice of the guy trying to get away with $7 and our instinctive, righteous response of sticking to him by saying "no deal" could just be a scaled down version of our reaction to all the injustices we feel (being dumped, being screwed by the phone company, etc.) and the illogical, sometimes self destructive, anger that frequently brews up.

It's like a game of chicken. One way to win the game is to throw your steering wheel out the window and let the other guy know you've done that. He knows that you can't turn away, so he has to. In negotiations, the ability to restrict your options can be a huge advantage. Anger is like that. A furious person has given up a certain degree of self control in order to emphasize the credibility of their threat. i.e. "I'll hurt you, even if I get nothing from it! Even if it destroys me!"

I think you're right about the Ultimatum game. I lived in Hong Kong for several years and thought a lot about the cultural differences between there and the US. In many ways, the US has worked its way to cooperative equilibria, while the Chinese are more likely to end up with non-cooperative solutions (littering, pushing to get onto the bus rather than standing in line, standing on the toilet seat, etc.).

In order to get to a cooperative equilibrium, one has to be willing to take actions that don't seem individually rational (such as refusing that one penny because it's 'unfair'). But the cooperative equilibria can make for a nicer society, if you can get to them.

I agree with other commentators that the statement
it is much more costly to hate when people are close to the object of that hatred, and transact with it regularly... isn't helpful, as people tend to hate things they interact with regularly.

I'm a NZer. Most people do not interact with NZers on a regular basis. According to this theory it is therefore cheaper to hate NZers. But all of us find that when we travel around the world people like us once they find out we're not Americans. (Including Americans - you people like our accents apparently. Which is odd, since our accent sounds terrible, but nice.).

Meanwhile some groups of people put masses of energy into trying to kill their neighbours.

And I know a few married couples who hate each other with an intensity that I've never seen conferred on a complete stranger.

I see someone referenced Friedman already.

I have to say, this is one of the more interesting posts I've seen here in a while. (I don't mean to take away from the other posts, but policy, after a while, blurs.)

i scratch my head a little--i think the issue you start with saying is that the playing out of hatred is not a one shot game, like the ultimatum game that you portray. Yet, there is no reason why the ultimatum game should be a one-shot game. what if it is not a one shot game, but played an infinite number of times? a sense of a straw man?

I'm not sure that "hate" is always the right word for what makes a person elect the "both sides get nothing" option in the "ultimatum game."

I used to think that income inequality was irrelevant -- that what mattered was standards of living, and if everyone had a decent one, who cares if someone had more? Does one person being richer than I am do me any harm?

Well, maybe -- especially if we're in the market for the same scarce goods.

You would think that I'd be better off accepting even $1, even if the other guy got to keep $9. But consider what would happen in a closed system, where each of us had $5 and there was a limited supply of goods: The money supply just got increased by $10, with no corresponding increase in the goods supply. All things being equal, inflation hits and the price of goods doubles. Now a $1 item costs me $2, so I can only buy 3 of them with my total $6 when I previously could have bought 5. I'm less well off. The other guy, on the other hand, can now afford to buy 7 items at the new price with his $14. He's better off, at my expense.

That's an abstract model, of course. But I can think of examples where other people's wealth might have a negative effect on others. For instance, what happens when a Californian drives into a little Idaho town with a sack full of home equity, and proceeds to buy up houses as investments?

look

I saw some sitcom a while back, where a British politician proposes to boycott the crass and imperialist American goods, to general approval. When it is pointed out what this would actually *mean* -- no jeans, no burgers, no rock-n-roll -- his ratings go through the floor.

My point being, that if the consequences of your hate *are* brought closely to you, then it reduces -- which is what I think your point is. I don't think that distance is the main determinant.

Which is why, on one hand Moldovians don't hate Mexicans (while the distance is great, the satisfaction isn't).

I have a dim recollection of a Rand study (cited by Dunnigan et al. in a book on the causes of war) that indicates that dissimilar cultures actually hate each other more the more they get to know each other.

This connects with a conversation I had at lunch with a fellow, not particularly good at hating, who confessed that the more he learns about Muslims, the more inclined he is to dislike Islam.

It seems that the data want to slay your beautiful theory. Happens to the best of us. But, given that your theory is superficially plausible, it would be interesting to hear your speculations on why things are not that way.

You would think that I'd be better off accepting even $1, even if the other guy got to keep $9. But consider what would happen in a closed system, where each of us had $5 and there was a limited supply of goods: The money supply just got increased by $10, with no corresponding increase in the goods supply.

Problem: real-world systems are too complex to be reduced this way. Unless the government is printing money like mad, $10 or $100,000 or whatever does not enter the system out of the clear blue sky; something was done to create or otherwise aquire said wealth, and that wealth is usually redistributed again in normal economic activity .

In the case of your Idaho real estate speculator, each purchase is not a one-way transaction in which the speculator burns the money upon the altar of the Boundary Line Gods, and the ashes recompose themselves into a land title. The former land owner now has the monetary value of that land, to save, spend, or re-invest elsewhere. It may not be pleasant to be a person who was hoping to buy land in that market, and it may be even less pleasant to be a non-seller whose property taxes will double in the following tax year, but there is nothing that is flatly black-and-white here.

What these experiments totally lack is the real emotion of hate. Hate is what a caveman would feel towards a tiger that ate one of his children and was stalking the rest. Rationally, going after a 400 pound tiger with a stone-tipped spear is unlikely to turn out well, but if that caveman hated enough, adrenaline would flow until he could attack in a berserk rage. In that state, strength is increased, you feel no pain, and blood is withdrawn from the extremities to the point that many wounds will not bleed until later. That caveman might or might not survive, but the tiger was not going to eat any more of his children...

What any normal person will feel about a bad split of the $10 is not hate, but merely irritation. You classify the other person as a cheater, and you don't want to deal with cheaters - starting right now, even if it means turning down $3. There are people who will hate over being cheated of even a trivial amount, but in the modern world they will usually spend most of their life in prison. In a primitive society, they'd get into fights until they were killed, or they killed someone and then were hunted down and killed or driven out of the tribe (which usually was just a slower way of killing).

Sothing is wrong with the game theory here.

Normally, people consider a bit more convoluted scenario: player B shows his strategy to player A, player A modifies the strategy, thus B modifies his strategy etc. until they reach equilibrium. If B and A are smart, it will take very little time.

Let us start with B having a strategy "accept deals of at least 1 dollar. A formulates a strategy "offer 1 dollar and 1 cent". So B gets his dollar, and 1 cent on top of it, and everyone is happy.

Let us change the strategy of B: "pick uniformly a random number between 0 and 10 and accept offers which are at least as large as the random number". Now if A offers x times 10 dollars, the offer is accepted with probability x, so A gets, on the average, x(1-x) times 10 dollars. A maximizes the expected profit if he offers 5 dollars. More interestingly, A could make a uniformly random offer too. In this case, A and B may have the same strategy and none can improve it.

Conclusions: before inviting A and B to Camp David, one should lecture them about Nash equilibrium, and prepare them that they will have to be ready to have their offer rejected without any malice or obstructionism -- just random strategy at work.

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