I think you are missing the game theory aspect of it. Even in the positive sum game the spoils aren’t divided equally. Additionally not everyone behaves rationally, i find the opposite to be generally true
I think you are missing the game theory aspect of it. Even in the positive sum game the spoils aren’t divided equally. Additionally not everyone behaves rationally, i find the opposite to be generally true
> I think you are missing the game theory aspect of it.
That's actually exactly how I think about this, let me explain my analysis.
I view it as the composition of two games. "Should we pursue the spoils?" is the first game, and the correct strategy is to play that game and coordinate with people to play it.
The zero sum game is dividing the spoils, this is conditioned on having won the first game. As long as everyone is guaranteed enough of the spoils ahead of time for the game to be positive EV, they will play it, and continue playing games like it.
When you apply this to a company, this is just an issue of mechanism design (inverse game theory). Why weren't you architecting the game that the employees play, such that there is relatively little to be gained from the zero sum game, and most of the value comes from the magnitude of contribution to the positive sum game?
Ideally people play a positive sum game with their coworkers that is tied to revenue and their contributions to it, to the tune of 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars a year, while the zero sum game is only worth 1000s of dollars a year.
I really don't see how your reply made a new point. What the other person was responding to was that even if you were to construct your positive sum game, you will have politics because reward distributions are not equal. The very fact that some people receive bigger bonuses, RSUs or promotions and others don't is an unequal distribution such that politics will be there.
Say everyone is compensated with equity. The goal is to increase share value. Yes every action that each employee takes in theory is going to be toward that goal because that's how they're incentivized through the compensation. But in reality you do a performance review and you have to decide how much some person contributed to the overall result, which isn't possible to objectively determine. And in that space of perception and subjectivity is were politics, or as I call it social arbitrage opportunity, exists.
So, since people will play the games anyway, companies should design the office politics in such a way that the company makes more money, and therefore it can afford to pay the team members more money too. Everyone in the company is therefore better off. Did I get that right?
How would such a positive-sum game look? I'm lacking imagination because I've never worked in an environment with such a positive game.