Quotes About Payoff

In outline, it is easy to see how a spatial game could work along the same lines as the cellular automata. The game players are arranged on a chessboardlike array (it can be in three dimensions, of course, or even more). During each round, the player on a given square plays the game with its neighbors. After this, each square is occupied by its original owner or by one of the eight neighbors, depending on who won that round—in other words, who got the biggest payoff.

But in more than a few cases, you can draw a straight line from a cop being laid off or a union worker having his or her pension slashed back to the week of 2008 when a handful of Lehman executives took a payoff to mark down their own inventory.

As the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner proved in the laboratory, the human mind seeks relationships between events and often finds them even when they are not present. Slot-machines are based on Skinnerian principles of intermittent reinforcement. The dumb human, like the dumb rat, only needs an occasional payoff to keep pulling the handle. The mind will do the rest.

Behavioural economists have demonstrated experimentally that in order to get someone to take a gamble or to risk an investment, the potential pay-off must be about twice the potential loss. To get a person to toss a coin to win or lose $10 (students), or $10,000 (wealthy executives), the pay-off has to be greater than or equal to $20, or $20,000.

Killing is the payoff of war.