Economic Modelling & Game Theory of Political Satirists - Content Creator Equilibrium

Journalists/Comedians and in general any Content Creator these days can be segmented into either of the following two categories. First, believe in targeting popular ideas/personalities and divide people along political cleavage. Second type of creators, steer away from such controversial issues; This type believe in creating 'Neutral Content'. 

Are Content Creators out of ideas or they are just doing something strategically optimal? Just to be loud & clear, by Content Creators I mean Journalists, Op-ed Columnists, Comedians, Singers,etc.

Unsuspecting people might have a strong opinion that the content produced by the Content Creators just have a bit of moralistic fervour but they are just good content made by artistic choice and not a result of some cunning assembly-line thinking of content production.

Can we develop any kind of Mathematical or Economic model to explain this separation of Content Creators along this theme? 

As a student of economics, I believe that the subject has best analytical tools to explain any behaviour and not give some predictive insights as most people would like to believe. So, here is my explanation or rather a simplified model to show why do Journalists & Comedians (Content Creators) target popular ideas/beliefs and extremely popular public personalities.

We don't need to go far. John Nash has given us a versatile structure to address these types of strategic interactions. Let's try to modify the strategic or normal-form game table

Why do Journalists & Comedians target popular ideas/beliefs/figures? - A game theoretic point of view  

Before you try to wrap your head around this intimidating looking table, I have a video in my Youtube Channel which you can watch below:

If you have understood what I was trying to show on my youtube video, then you don't need to read further. Thanks! But, if you need more fillers to understand the model in detail, let me start my exposition. (I'll also be attaching my slides at the bottom of this post)

Content Creator has two strategies , 'Attack the Popular' and 'Be Neutral'. And, Society has two strategic sentiment choices, it can choose to 'Ignore the Creator' or 'Give Attention'. The relevant payoff or notional value is given in the table above, of the form (Creator's Value, Society's Value)

What could be the equilibrium in such a situation? We cannot claim this equilibrium to be a Nash Equilibrium, in the real sense of the term, as we are trying to engage in a very different environment than n-player simultaneous move game. 

In order for you to understand the payoff structure well, assume that the society is composed of two types of people. One group is attached to the 'popular idea' being attacked and the other group which is not bothered. So, if the Content Creator attacks the popular idea and society chooses to ignore the Creator & doesn't give him enough publicity & marketing, society has a negative value because one group gets negative payoff and the other group gets nothing. Now, when society responds to Creator's attack with attention, society gets 0 as half of the people get some value and the remaining get negative. (Oversimplification Alert!)

Similarly, you can figure out the rest of the table.

Let's jump to the substance of this analysis. 

Consider the case when h > 2 (as in the digram above)

This would imply that 600/h < 300. This has an implication on the outcome of the model. If you look at the cell containing (300,0) or when society responds to Creator's attack with attention , you can very well reason that it is an equilibrium, you can call it Nash equilibrium but it won't be technically correct to say so. Given that the Creator is going to attack the 'popular idea', society is better off with giving him/her attention because if society unilaterally moves to ignoring the Creator, they will receive a negative payoff of -300. Similarly, given that society is giving the Creator the attention he/she craves for, Creator gets 300 and if he resorts to producing 'Neutral Content' instead, he will get only 600/h < 300. So, he also has no profitable unilateral deviation. Hence, this is an equilibrium. This is generally observed when the Creator is upcoming and not so famous or produces relatively substandard content. 

Consider the case when h < 2 (as in the diagram above)

This would imply that 600/h > 300. This means that the Creator is having an incentive to move away from content which sparks outrage to producing 'Neutral Content'. Production of 'Neutral Content' becomes a 'Dominant Strategy' for the Creator. Now, it depends upon the value of K, which you can see in the image above, how the society is going to react to Creator's 'Neutral Content'. 

To put it briefly, 

- K>600/h means society remembers that the Creator has a history of producing content which was attacking in nature(attacking the popular idea...) and dislikes the Creator giving us an equilibrium outcome of Creator being 'Neutral' but still gets 'Ignored' 

- K<600/h means that society respects & enjoys the Content created by the 'Neutral Content Creator' and we get the best type of win-win equilibrium with payoff equivalent to (600/h, 600/h).

Summary:

This model predicts that new 'Content Creators' who want to establish themselves, resort to attacking popular ideas & personalities and society gives them attention; this is an equilibrium. Also, a Creator who is liked by the society has a dominant strategy to produce 'Neutral Content'. This further implies that when a Creator starts getting some fame he/she has a 'Dominant Strategy' to quickly pivot from provocative/sensitive content to 'Neutral Content',  as persistence of attack is suboptimal strategy. 

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Find the slides here : (Starts from the 4th slide)

What's the Actual Doubling Rate of Covid-19 & Number of Days for Herd Immunity?

I refrained from doing any analysis on Covid-19 pandemic owing to its complexity and the seriousness of the issue. 

Perhaps, everything has a life and I had to give a chance to analysing the coronavirus data. A bit of disclaimer : this is not going to be a dashboard or predictive in nature. 

After hearing a lot about the doubling rate of last 3 days, previous week, last 10 days and what not, I decided to dig deeper and find out the actual doubling rate. 

Let's understand where I am coming from. If the number of infected case goes from 1 to 2, it has doubled, if it has gone from 2 to 4 it has doubled again, 4 to 8 means another round of doubling, and so on, we all know where this is heading towards.

To make it more clear, if we have total number of infected cases equal to 32 we have doubled 5 times(25=32). 

As you can see above that India's total detected infection count has doubled 17 times and at an average rate of ~6/7 days, way different than the 10/12/15 days doubling rate floating around in media. I must add that last few doubling iterations have taken longer time which is a good sign. 

So, what we are doing is that taking the total no. of days and dividing it by total number of doubling iterations. In other words, taking total number of days as 116 and dividing it by # of doubling iterations, which is 17, gives us ~7 days. The Cumulative doubling column in the chart above is calculated in the same way, for calculating the average doubling rate till that number of iterations(Days/Doubling iteration)

 So, how long can this continue? What's the end game?

Taking India's population as roughly 1.38 billion we can't double beyond 30 times as 231 is greater than 1.38 billion. This means beyond 30 doubling instances everybody gets infected with Covid-19. Scary!

Obviously, we can't go that path. The doubling rate will significantly drop over the course of this situation we are in, which can also be checked in the graph above, blue line overshooting the plateau red one. What about the herd immunity argument? 

Taking 6 Day doubling rate entire country would get infected in 84 days and 98 days is needed with 7 Day doubling rate. If we take the most recent doubling rate of 13 days, it would take 182 days or roughly 6 months for all of India to get infected. 

If we go by Wikipedia for sake of simplicity, herd immunity requires anything in the range 29%-74% of the population to get infected . You can check how many days it would take to cross that threshold above in the chart. I would still write it down.

With 6 Day doubling rate, 72 days & 78 days are respective numbers for 29% & 74% requirement.

With 7 Day doubling rate, 84 days & 91 days are respective numbers for 29% & 74% requirement.

With 13 Day doubling rate, 156 days & 169 days are respective numbers for 29% & 74% requirement.

Find the spreadsheet here : https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UrGSNkRgACyZBQYelghqk8T7m6YmR8c8wv6gw9221g0/edit?usp=sharing

If you are careful you can see the subtle predictive aspect of this analysis too but I would not like to get into that. 

Keep watching this space as I would be adding more content on the Covid-19 Coronavirus pandemic situation. 

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