Tag: tautology

Tautological Claims

Sometimes the media can’t easily reason on what led to something that they consider to be negative. In such cases they resort to tautologies. One version of this was seen in the late 2000s, during the Global Financial Crisis. The crisis “was caused by greed”, claimed many a story. “It is because of the greed of a handful of bankers that we have to suffer”, they said.

Fast forward ten to twelve years later, and the global financial crisis is behind us (though many economies aren’t yet doing as well as they were before that crisis). The big problem that a lot of people are facing is addiction – to their smartphones, to apps, to social media, and so on. Once again, media at large seems to have been unable to reason effectively on why this addiction is happening. And so once again, they are resulting in “tautologies”.

“Apps are engineered so that you engage more with them”, they say. If you ask the product manager in charge of the app, you will find out that his metric is to increase user engagement, and make sure people spend more time on the app. “Apps use psychological tools to make you spend more time on them”, the outlets write, as if that is a bad thing.

However, if you are an overstretched product manager hard-pressed to increase engagement, there is no surprise that you would use every possible method – logical and psychological, to do so. And if that means relying on psychological research that talks about how to increase addiction, so be it!

It is tautological that social media companies “want to increase engagement” or “want to increase the amount of time people spend on the platforms”, and that they will try to achieve these goals. So when media agencies talk about these goals as something to be scared about, it’s like they’re bullshitting – there’s absolutely no information that is being added in such headlines.

It is similar to how a decade and a bit ago the same media decided to blame a fundamental human tendency – greed – for the financial crisis.

Methods of Negotiations

There are fundamentally two ways in which you can negotiate a price. You can either bargain or set a fixed price. Bargaining induces temporary transaction costs – you might end up fighting even, as you are trying to negotiate. But in the process you and the counterparty are giving each other complete information of what you are thinking, and at every step in the process, there is some new information that is going into the price. Finally, if you do manage to strike a deal, it will turn out to be one that both of you like (ok I guess that’s a tautology). Even when there is no deal, you know you at least tried.

In a fixed price environment, on the other hand, you need to take into consideration what the other person thinks the price should be. There’s a fair bit of game theory involved and you constantly need to be guessing, about what the other person might be thinking, and probably adjust your price accordingly. There is no information flow during the course of the deal, and that can severely affect the chances of a deal happening. The consequences in terms of mental strain could be enormous in case you are really keen that the deal goes through.

Some people find the fixed price environment romantic. They think it’s romantic that one can think exactly on behalf of the counterparty and offer them a fair deal. What they fail to discount is the amount of thought process and guessing that actually goes in to the process of determining the “fair deal”. What they discount is the disappointment that has occurred in the past when they’ve been offered an unfair deal, and can do nothing about it because the price is fixed. But I guess that’s the deal about romance – you remember all the nice parts and ignore that similar conditions could lead to not-so-nice outcomes.

Bargaining, on the other hand has none of this romance. It involves short-term costs, fights even. But that’s the best way to go about it if you are keen on striking a deal. Unfortunately the romantics think it’s too unromantic (guess it’s because it’s too practical) and think that if you want a high probability of a deal, you should be willing to offer a fixed price. And the fight continues.. Or maybe not – it could even be a “take it or leave it” thing.