Involution(内卷) a thought extended from reading <Thinking strategically>

alberty111 | Sept. 19, 2021, 2:39 p.m.

Involution (内卷) has been a popular term used lately from 2017 in China. It first started in IT business where has been a booming industry for decades. I remember when I went to colledge, a lot of counselors would suggest their students to major in CS, because at that time (even now), IT engineers are one of the highest paid jobs (not pay per working hour though). But ofc this brings problems, on of them which we now see as 'Involution'. There is one article on new yorker briefly introduce the history of the hot term -- involution.

I want to explain the term 'involuiton' in game theory.'Involution' can be treated as one equilibrium in game theory. The game is player as multi-players: you and your colleagues. the payoff of the game is the money you boss paid you. Let's consider two scenario here:

Scenario 1: Your boss doesn't care how hard (much) a employee work as long as you finish the assigned works, he just pays everyone the same salary (1000/month):

What would happend? every employee just finish their job, nothing more and nothing less. Everyone works the same and reach a equilibrium at low-end (work load wise).

Scenario 2: Your boss like hard working employee, he actually pays more to hard-worker than others. (200 more/month):

what would happend in this case. first someone would start working hard and gets paid more:1200/month, others realised, start working just as hard as the first one, now no one works harder, the boss just paid 1000/month, someone is not happy works even harder... You see, the loop keeps going on.

Two cases have similar players: boss and employees. But different rules and payoffs. You can see how big the difference can rules make on player (employees). Depending on your role you might want to achieve scenario 1 or 2, all you need to do is to try to shift the rules to the scenario you want. There are also ways to avoid scenario 2 for examples: introducing a third player (government, union), changing rules (regulations), employees start coordinates and cooperates together.

The 'involuition' in actually involved in game theory as cooperation and coordination. The downhill of scenario 2 is that multiple employees are competting each others without any cooperation and coordination. Recently I talk to my brother who works in independent conveniece store. He told me that the owners of conveniece stores around his blocks forms a sort of group, they would weekly discuss prices on certain popular products and set up a price, everyone should follow the guideline. If someone break the rules, he will recieve punishment, banned from the group for a certain amount of time and get little sources from supplier and less help from other shop owners. This is pretty interesting that owners of the shop who probably don't even know the term 'game theory' applied a strategic (studied by  game theory scholars) to fight against 'involuiton' effectively. In a way proves that game-theory is not a study of 'theory', but a study of human.

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