A good example of "altruistic punishment" as named by Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter in the paper in Nature a few weeks ago I think it was Choated to the list but I got bored searching the archives for it - it was mentioned by John Young and someone else in context of not feeding the koalas though.
Obvious sum: If spammers send M messages, hoping to get B benefit from each sucker who replies, and if a proportion S of recipients are suckers, and a proportion, P, of recipients choose to punish, and each punishment causes D disbenefit then obviously if (SB < PD) spam won't pay. As both S & B are usually negligible for spammers & D in this case if very large, maybe we have the answer :-) But it won't apply if spammers aren't rational actors (maybe like our friendly neighbourhood bilby) There are maybe other CP & crypto relevancies in that paper (although to be honest I thought it was kind of obvious for Nature). Maybe more after a seminar on it tomorrow. Ken Brown Tim May wrote: > > At a party on Saturday, the subject of the huge amount of Chinese > language spam came up. Lucky had the best idea: reply to it with > forbidden language about arms shipments, revolution, etc. > > The general idea is to say something like "Thank you for your > communication. Death to the fascist Communist government!" [...snip...]
