# Will we ever build a Galactic Empire?

I devoured science fiction as a kid. One of my favorite books was Asimov’s Foundation, which told the story of a splintering Galactic Empire and the seeds of a new civilization that would grow from its ashes. I marveled and was filled with joy at the notion that in our far future humanity might spread across the galaxy, settling countless new planets and bringing civilization to every corner of it.

Then I went to college and learned physics, especially special relativity and cosmology, and learned that there are actually some hugely significant barriers in the way of these visions ever being manifest in reality. Ever since, it has seemed obvious to me that the idea of a galactic civilization, or of humans “colonizing the universe” are purely fantasy. But I am continuously surprised when I hear those interested in futurism throw around these terms casually, as if their occurrence were an inevitability so long as humans stay around long enough. This is deeply puzzling to me. Perhaps these people are just being loose with their language, and when they refer to a galactic civilization, they mean something much more modest, like a loosely-connected civilization spread across a few nearby stars. Or maybe there is a fundamental misunderstanding of both the limitations imposed on us by physics and the the enormity of the scales in question. Either way, I want to write a post explaining exactly why these science fiction ideas are almost certainly never going to become reality.

My argument in brief:

1. We are really slow.
2. The galaxy is really big.
3. The universe is even bigger.

Back in 1977, humans launched the Voyager 1 spacecraft, designed to explore the outer solar system and then to head for the stars. Its trajectory was coordinated to slingshot around Jupiter and then Saturn, picking up speed at each stage, and then finally to launch itself out of the solar system into the great beyond. 36 years later, in 2012, it has finally left the Sun’s heliopause, marking the first steps into interstellar space. It is now 11.7 billion miles from Earth, which sounds great until you realize that this distance is still less than two-tenths of a single percent of one light year.

Compare this to, say, the distance to the nearest star Alpha Centauri, we find that it has traveled less than .05% of the distance. At this rate, it would take another 80,000 years to make contact with Alpha Centauri (if it were aimed in that direction)! On the scale of distances between stars, our furthest current exploration has gotten virtually nowhere. It’s the equivalent of somebody who started in the center of the Earth hoping to burrow up all the way to the surface, and takes 5 days to travel a single meter. Over 42 years, they would have travelled just under 3000 meters.

OK, you say, but that’s unfair. The Voyager was designed in the 70s! Surely we could do better with modern space shuttle design. To which my reply is, sure we can do better now, but not better enough. The fastest thing humans have ever designed is the Helios 2 shuttle, which hit a speed of 157,078 mph at its fastest (.023% of the speed of light). If we packed some people in this shuttle (which we couldn’t) and sent it off towards the nearest star (assuming that it stayed at this max speed the entire journey), guess how long it would take? Over 18 thousand years.

And keep in mind, this is only talking about the nearest star, let alone spreading across the galaxy! It should be totally evident to everybody that the technology we would need to be able to reach the stars is still far far away. But let’s put aside the limits of our current technology. We are still in our infancy as a space-faring species in many ways, and it is totally unfair to treat our current technology level as if it’s something set in stone. Let’s give the futurists the full benefit of the doubt, and imagine that in the future humans will be able to harness incredible quantities of energy that vastly surpass anything we have today. If we keep increasing our energy capacity more and more, is there any limitation on how fast we could get a spacecraft going? Well, yes there is! There is a fundamental cosmic speed limit built into the of the universe, which is of course the speed of light. The speed-vs-energy curve has a vertical asymptote at this value; no finite amount of energy can get you past this speed.

So much for arbitrarily high speeds. What can we do with spacecraft traveling near the speed of light? It turns out, a whole lot more! Suppose we can travel at 0.9 times the speed of light, and grant also that the time to accelerate up to this speed is insignificant. Now it only takes us 4.7 years to get to the nearest star! The next closest star takes us 6.6 years. Next is 12.3 years. This is not too bad! Humans in the past have made years-long journeys to discover new lands. Surely we could do it again to settle the stars.

But now let’s consider the trip to the center of the galaxy. At 90% the speed of light, this journey would take 29,000 years. As you can see, there’s a massive difference between jumping to nearby stars and attempting to actually traverse the galaxy. The trouble is that most people don’t realize just how significant this change in distance scale is. When you hear “distance to Alpha Centauri” and “distance to the center of the Milky Way”, you are probably not intuitively grasping how hugely different these two quantities are. Even if we had a shuttle traveling at 99.99% times the speed of light, it would take over 100,000 years to travel the diameter of the Milky Way.

You might be thinking “Ok, that is quite a long time. But so what! Surely there will be some intrepid explorers that are willing to leave behind the safety of settled planets to bring civilization to brand new worlds. After all, taking into account time dilation, a 1000 year journey from Earth’s perspective only takes 14 years to pass from the perspective of a passenger on a ship traveling at 99.99% percent of the speed of light.”

And I accept that! It doesn’t seem crazy that if humans develop shuttle that travel a significant percentage of the speed of light, we could end up with human cities scattered all across the galaxy. But now the issue is with the idea of a galactic CIVILIZATION. Any such civilization faces a massive problem, which is the issue of communication. Even having a shared society between Earth and a planet around our nearest star would be enormously tricky, being that any information sent from one planet to the other would take more than four years to arrive. The two societies would be perpetually four years behind each other, and this raises some serious issues for any central state attempting to govern both. And it’s safe to say that no trade can exist between two planets that have a 10,000 year delay in communication. Nor can any diplomacy, or common leadership, or shared culture or technology, or ANY of the necessary prerequisites for a civilization.

I think that for these reasons, it’s evident that the idea of a Galactic Empire like Asimov’s could never come into being. The idea of such a widespread civilization must rely on an assumption that humans will at some point learn to send faster than light messages. Which, sure, we can’t rule out! But everything in physics teaches us that we should be betting very heavily against it. Our attitude towards the idea of an eventual real life Galactic Empire should be similar to our attitude towards perpetual motion machines, as both rely on a total rewriting of the laws of physics as we know them.

But people don’t stop at a Galactic Empire. Not naming names, but I hear people that I respect throwing around the idea that humans can settle the universe. This is total madness. The jump in distance scale from diameters of galaxies to the size of the observable universe, is 40 times larger than the jump in distance scale we previously saw from nearby stars to galactic diameters. The universe is really really big, and as it expands, every second more of it is vanishing from our horizon of observable events.

Ok, so let’s take the claim to be something much more modest than the literal ‘settle galaxies all across the observable universe’. Let’s take it that they just mean that humans will spread across our nearest neighborhood of galaxies. The problem with this is again that the distance scale in question is just unimaginably large. Clearly we can’t have a civilization across galaxies (as we can’t even have a civilization across a single galaxy). But now even making the trip is a seemingly insurmountable hurdle. The Andromeda Galaxy (the nearest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way) is 2 million light years away. Even traveling at 99.99% of the speed of light, this would be a 28,000 year journey for those within the ship. From one edge of the Virgo supercluster (our cluster of neighbor galaxies) to the other takes 110 million years at the speed of light. To make this trip doable in a single lifetime requires a speed of 99.999999999999% of c (which would result in the trip taking 16 years inside the spacecraft). The kinetic energy required to get a mass m to these speeds is given by KE = (γ – 1) mc2. If our shuttle and all the people on it have a mass of, say, 1000 kg, the required energy ends up being approximately the entire energy output of the Sun per second.

Again, it’s possible that if humans survive long enough and somehow get our hands on the truly enormous amounts of energy required to get this close to the speed of light, then we could eventually have human societies springing up in nearby galaxies, in total isolation from one another. But (1) it’s far from obvious that we will ever be capable of mastering such enormous amounts of energy, and (2) I think that this is not what futurists are visualizing when they talk about settling the universe.

Let me just say that I still love science fiction, love futurism, and stand in awe when I think of all the incredible things the march of technological progress will likely bring us in the future. But this seems to be one area where the way that our future prospects are discussed is really far off the mark, and where many people would do well to significantly adjust their estimates of the plausibility of the future trajectories they are imagining. Though science and future technology may bring us many incredible new abilities and accomplishments as a species, a galactic or intergalactic civilization is almost certainly not one of them.

# Earning to give or waiting to give

Merry Christmas! In the spirit of the season, let’s talk about altruism.

Anybody familiar with the effective altruism movement knows about the concept of earning to give. The idea is that for some people, the ideal altruistic career path might involve them making lots of money in a non-charitable role and then donating a significant fraction of that to effective charities. Estimates from GiveWell for the current lowest cost to save a life put it around $2,300, which indicates that choosing a soulless corporate job that allows you to donate$150,000 a year could actually be better than choosing an altruistic career in which you are on average saving 65 lives per year, or more than a life per week!

What I’m curious about lately is the concept of earning to save up to give. At the time of writing, the rate of return on US treasury bills is 1.53%. US treasury bills are considered to be practically riskless – you get a return on your investment no matter what happens to the economy. Assuming that this rate of return and the $2,300 figure both stay constant, what this means is that by holding off on donating your$150,000 for five years, you expect to be able to donate about $11,830 more, which corresponds to saving 5 extra lives. And if you hold off for twenty years, you will be able to save 23 more lives! If you choose to take on bigger risk, you can do even better than this. Instead of investing in treasury bills, you could put your money into a diversified portfolio of stocks and expect to get a rate of return of around 7% (the average annualized total return of the S&P 500 for the past 90 years, adjusted for inflation). Now you run the risk of the stock market being in a slump at the end of five years, but even if that happens you can just wait it out longer until the market rises again. In general, as your time horizon for when you’re willing to withdraw your investment expands, your risk drops. If you invest your$150,000 in stocks and withdraw after five years, you expect to save an extra 26 lives than you would by donating right away!

In general, you can choose your desired level of risk and get the best available rate of return by investing in an appropriate linear combination of treasury bills and stocks. And if you want a higher rate of return than 7%, you can take on more risk by leveraging the market (short selling the risk-free asset and using the money to invest more in stocks). In this model, the plan for maximizing charitable giving would be to continuously invest your income at your chosen level of risk, donating nothing until some later date at which time you make an enormous contribution to your choice of top effective charities. In an extreme case, you could hold off on donations your entire life and then finally make the donation in your will!

Alright, so let’s discuss some factors in favor and against this plan.

Factors in favor
Compounding interest
Decreasing moral and factual uncertainty

Factors against
Shrinking frontier of low hanging fruit
Personal moral regression
Future discounting
Infinite procrastination

## Compounding interest and vanishing low hanging fruits

First, and most obviously, waiting to give means more money, and more money means more lives. And since your investment grows exponentially, being sufficiently patient can mean large increases in amount donated and lives saved. There’s a wrinkle in this argument though. While your money grows with time, it might be that the effective cost of improving the world grows even quicker. This could result from the steady improvement of the world: problems are getting solved and low hanging altruistic fruits are being taken one at a time, leaving us with a set of problems that take more money to solve, making them less effective in terms of impact per dollar donated. If the benefit of waiting is a 5% annual return on your investment, but the cost is a 6% decrease in the effective number of lives saved per dollar donated, then it is best to donate as soon as possible, so as to ensure that your dollars have the greatest impact.

Estimates of the trends in effectiveness of top charities are hard to come by, but crucially important for deciding when to give and when to wait.

## Moral and factual uncertainty

Say that today you donate 50,000 dollars to Charity X, and tomorrow an exposé comes out revealing that this charity is actually significantly less effective than previously estimated. That money is gone now, and you can’t redirect it to a better charity in response to this new information. But if you had waited to donate, you would be able to respond and more accurately target your money to the most effective charities. The longer you wait to donate, the more time there is to gather the relevant data, analyze it, and come to accurate conclusions about the effectiveness of charities. This is a huge benefit of waiting to give.

That was an example of factual uncertainty. You might also be concerned about moral uncertainty, and think that in the future you will have better values than today. For instance, you may think that your future values, after having had more time to reflect and consider new arguments, will be more rational and coherent than your current values. This jumps straight into tricky meta-ethical territory; if you are a moral realist then it makes sense to talk about improving your values, but as a non-realist this is harder to make sense of. Regardless, there certainly is a very common intuition that individuals can make moral progress, and that we can “improve our values” by thinking deeply about ethics.

William MacAskill has talked about a related concept, applied on a broader civilizational level. Here’s a quote from his 80,000 Hours interview:

Different people have different sets of values. They might have very different views for what an optimal future looks like. What we really want ideally is a convergent goal between different sorts of values so that we can all say, “Look, this is the thing that we’re all getting behind that we’re trying to ensure that humanity…” Kind of like this is the purpose of civilization. The issue, if you think about purpose of civilization, is just so much disagreement. Maybe there’s something we can aim for that all sorts of different value systems will agree is good. Then, that means we can really get coordination in aiming for that.

I think there is an answer. I call it the long reflection, which is you get to a state where existential risks or extinction risks have been reduced to basically zero. It’s also a position of far greater technological power than we have now, such that we have basically vast intelligence compared to what we have now, amazing empirical understanding of the world, and secondly tens of thousands of years to not really do anything with respect to moving to the stars or really trying to actually build civilization in one particular way, but instead just to engage in this research project of what actually is a value. What actually is the meaning of life? And have, maybe it’s 10 billion people, debating and working on these issues for 10,000 years because the importance is just so great. Humanity, or post-humanity, may be around for billions of years. In which case spending a mere 10,000 is actually absolutely nothing.

## Personal moral regression

On the other side of the issue of changing values over time, we have the problem of personal moral regression. If I’m planning to save up for an eventual donation decades down the line, I might need to seriously worry about the possibility that when the time comes to donate I have become a more selfish person or have lost interest in effective altruism. Plausibly, as you age you might become more attached to your money or expect a higher standard of living than when you were younger. This is another of these factors that is hard to estimate, and depends a lot on the individual.

Earning to give is already a concept that draws criticism in some quarters, and I think that waiting to give may look worse in some ways. I could easily see the mainstream revile the idea of a community of self-proclaimed altruists that mostly sit around and build up wealth with the promise to donate it some time into the future. Tied in with this is the concern that by removing the signaling value of your form of altruism, some of the motivation to actually be altruistic in the first place is lost.

## Future discounting

Economists commonly talk about temporal discounting, the idea of weighting current value higher than future value. Give somebody a choice between an ice cream today and two ice creams in a month, and they will likely choose the ice cream today. This indicates that there is some discount rate on future value to make somebody indifferent to a nominally identical current value. This discount rate is often thought of purely descriptively, as a way to model a particular aspect of human psychology, but it is also sometimes factored into recommendations for policy.

For instance, some economists talk about a social discount rate, which represents the idea of valuing future generations less than the current generation. This discount rate actually also factors importantly into the calculation of the appropriate value of a carbon tax. Most major calculations of the carbon tax explicitly use a non-zero social discount rate, meaning that they assume that future generations matter less than current generations. For instance, William Nordhaus’s hugely influential work on carbon pricing used a “3 percent social discount rate that slowly declines to 1 percent in 300 years.”

I don’t think that this makes much moral sense. If you apply a constant discount rate to the future, you can end up saying things like “I’d rather get a nickel today than save the entire planet a thousand years from now.” It seems to me that this form of discounting is simply prejudice against those people are most remote from us: those that are in our future and as such do not exist yet. This paper by Tyler Cowen and Derek Parfit argues against a social discount rate. From the paper:

Remoteness in time roughly correlates with a whole range of morally important facts. So does remoteness in space. Those to whom we have the greatest obligation, our own family, often live with us in the same building. We often live close to those to whom we have other special obligations, such as our clients, pupils, or patients. Most of our fellow citizens live closer to us than most aliens. But no one suggests that, because there are such correlations, we should adopt a spatial discount rate. No one thinks that we would be morally justified if we cared less about the long-range effects of our acts, at some rate of n percent per yard. The temporal discount rate is, we believe, as little justified.

## Infinite procrastination

There’s one final consideration I want to bring up, which is more abstract than the previous ones. Earlier I imagined somebody who decides to save up their entire life and make their donation in their will. But we can naturally ask: why not set up your will to wait another twenty years and then donate to the top-rated charities from your estimate of the most reliable charity evaluator? And then why stop at just twenty years? Why not keep on investing, letting your money build up more and more, all to the end of making some huge future donation and makes an absolutely enormous benefit to some future generation? The concern is that this line of reasoning might never terminate.

While this is a fun thought experiment, I think there are a few fairly easy holes that can be poked in it. In reality, you will eventually run up against decreasing marginal value of your money. At some point, the extra money you get by waiting another year actually doesn’t go far enough to make up for the human suffering you could have prevented. Additionally, the issue of vanishing low hanging fruits will become more and more pressing, pushing you towards

## Summing up

We can neatly sum up the previous considerations with the following formula.

V = Q − p(1 − d)(Q + I − F)(R − p)
If V > 0, then giving now is preferable to giving in a year. If V < 0, then you should wait for at least a year.

Q = Current lives saved per dollar
R = Rate of return on investment
I = Reflection factor: yearly increase in lives saved per dollar from better information and longer reflection
p = Regression factor: expected percentage less you are willing to give in a year
F = Low hanging fruit factor: yearly decrease in lives saved per dollar
d = Temporal discount factor: percentage less that lives are valued each year

The ideal setting for waiting to give is where F is near zero (the world’s issues are only very slowly being sorted out), I is large (time for reflection is sorely needed to bring empirical data and moral clarity), p is near zero (no moral regression), R is large (you get a high return on your investment), and d is near zero (you have little to no moral preference for helping current people over future people).

# Diversification is magic

“The only free lunch in finance is diversification”

Harry Markowitz

Suppose you have two assets that you can invest in, and $1000 dollars total to split between them. By the end of year 1, Asset A doubles in price and Asset B halves in price. And by the end of year 2, A halves and B doubles (so that they each return to their starting point). If you had initially invested all$1000 in Asset A, then after year 1 you would have $2000 total. But after year 2, that$2000 is cut in half and you end up back at $1000. If you had invested the$1000 in Asset B, then you would go down to $500 after year 1 and then back up to$1000 after year 2. Either way, you don’t get any profit.

Now, the question is: can you find some way to distribute the $1000 dollars across Assets A and B such that by the end of year 2 you have made a profit? For fairness sake, you cannot change your distribution at the end of year 1 (as that would allow you to take advantage of the advance knowledge of how the prices will change). Whatever weights you choose initially for Assets A and B, at the end of year 1 you must move around your money so that you ensure it’s still distributed with the exact same weights as before. So what do you think? Does it seem impossible to make a profit without changing your distribution of money between years 1 and 2? Amazingly, the answer is that it’s not impossible; you can make a profit! Consider a 50/50 mix of Assets A and B. So$500 initially goes into Asset A and $500 to Asset B. At the end of year 1, A has doubled in price (netting you$500) and B has halved (losing you $250). So at the end of year 1 you have gained 25%. To keep the weights the same at the start of year 2 as they were at the start of year 1, you redistribute your new total of$1250 across A and B according to the same 50/50 mix ($625 in each). What happens now? Now Asset A halves (losing you$312.50) and Asset B doubles (gaining you $625). And by the end of year 2, you end up with$312.50 in A and $1250 in B, for a total of$1562.50! You’ve gained $562.50 by investing in two assets whose prices ultimately are the same as where they started! This is the magic of diversification. By investing in multiple independent assets instead of just one, you can up your rate of return and decrease your risk, sometimes dramatically. Another example: In front of you are two fair coins, A and B. You have in your hand$100 that you can distribute between the two coins any way you like, so long as all $100 is on the table. Now, each of the coins will be tossed. If a coin lands heads, the amount of money beside it will be doubled and returned to you. But if the coin lands tails, then all the money beside it will be destroyed. In front of you are two coins, A and B. You have$100 dollars to distribute between these two coins. You get to choose how to distribute the $100, but at the end every dollar bill must be beside one coin or the other. Coin A has a 60% chance of landing H. If it lands H, the amount of money placed beside it will be multiplied by 2.1 and returned to you. But if it lands T, then the money placed beside it will be lost. Coin B has only a 40% chance of landing H. But the H outcome also has a higher reward! If the coin lands H, then the amount of money beside it will be multiplied by 2.5 and returned to you. And just like Coin A, if it lands T then the money beside it will be destroyed. Coin A: .6 chance of getting 2.1x return Coin B: .4 chance of getting 2.5x return The coins are totally independent. How should you distribute your money in order to maximize your return, given a specific level of risk? (Think about it for a moment before reading on.) If you looked at the numbers for a few moments, you might have noticed that Coin A has a higher expected return than Coin B (126% vs 100%) and is also the safer of the two. So perhaps your initial guess was that putting everything into Coin A would minimize risk and maximize return. Well, that’s incorrect! Let’s do the math. We’ll start by giving the relevant quantities some names. X = amount of money that is put by Coin A Y = amount of money that is put by Coin B (All your money is put down, so Y = 100 – X) We can easily compute the expected amount of money you end up with, as a function of X: Expected return (X) = (0.6)(0.4)(2.1X + 2.5Y) + (0.6)(0.6)(2.1X) + (0.4)(0.4)(2.5Y) + (0.4)(0.6)(0) = 100 + .26 X Alright, so clearly your expected return is maximized by making X as large as possible (by putting all of your money by Coin A). This makes sense, since Coin A’s expected return is higher than Coin B’s. But we’re not just interested in return, we’re also interested in risk. Could we possibly find a better combination of risk and reward by mixing our investments? It might initially seem like the answer is no; after all Coin A is the safer of the two. How could we possibly decrease risk by mixing in a riskier asset to our investments? The key insight is that even though Coin A is the safer of the two, the risk of Coin B is uncorrelated with the risk of Coin A. If you invest everything in Coin A, then you have a 40% chance of losing it all. But if you split your investments between Coin A and Coin B, then you only lose everything if both coins come up heads (which happens with probability .6*.4 = 24%, much lower than 40%!) Let’s go through the numbers. We’ll measure risk by the standard deviation of the possible outcomes. Risk(X)2 = (0.6)(0.4)(2.1X + 2.5Y – 100 – .26X)2 + (0.6)(0.6)(2.1X – 100 – .26X)2 + (0.4)(0.4)(2.5Y – 100 – .26X)2 + (0.4)(0.6)(0 – 100 – .26X)2 This function is just a parabola (to be precise, Risk2 is a parabola, which means that Risk(x) is a hyperbola). Here’s a plot of Risk(X) vs X (amount placed beside A): Looking at this plot, you can see that risk is actually minimized at a roughly even mix of A and B, with slightly more in B. You can also see this minimum risk on a plot of return vs risk: Notice that somebody that puts most of their money on coin B (these mixes are in the bottom half of the curve) is making a strategic choice is strictly dominated. That is, they could choose a different mix that has a higher rate of return for the same risk! Little did you know, but you’ve actually just gotten an introduction to modern portfolio theory! Instead of putting money beside coins, portfolio managers consider investing in assets with various risks and rates of return. The curve of reward vs risk is famous in finance as the Markowitz Bullet. The upper half of the curve is the set of portfolios that are not strictly dominated. This section of the curve is known as the efficient frontier, the basic idea being that no rational investor would put themselves on the lower half. Let’s reframe the problem in terms that would be familiar to somebody in finance. We have two assets, A and B. We’ll model our knowledge of the rate of return of each asset as a normal distribution with some known mean and standard deviation. The mean of the distribution represents the expected rate of return on a purchase of the asset, and the standard deviation represents the risk of purchasing the asset. Asset A has an expected rate of return of 1.2, which means that for every dollar you put in you expect (on average) to get back$0.20 a year from now. Asset B’s expected rate of return is 1.3, so it has a higher average payout. But Asset B is riskier; the standard deviation for A is 0.5, while B’s standard deviation is 0.8. There’s also a risk-free asset that you can invest in, which we’ll call Asset F. This asset has an expected rate of return of 1.1.

Asset F: R = 1.1, σ = 0
Asset A: R = 1.2, σ = 0.5
Asset B: R = 1.3, σ = 0.8

Suppose that you have $1000 that you want to invest in some combination of these three assets in such a way as to maximize your expected rate of return and minimize your risk. Since rate of return and risk will in general be positively correlated, you have to decide the highest risk that you’re comfortable with. Let’s say that you decide that the highest risk you’ll accept is 0.6. Now, how much of each asset should you purchase? First of all, let’s disregard the risk-free asset and just consider combinations of A and B. A portfolio of A and B is represented by the weighted sum of A and B. wA is the percentage of your investment in the portfolio that goes to just A, and wB is the percentage that goes towards B. Since we’re just considering a combination of A and B for now, wA + wB = 1. The mean and standard deviation of the new distribution for this portfolio will in general depend on the correlation between A and B, which we’ll call ρ. Perfectly correlated assets have ρ = 1, uncorrelated assets have ρ = 0, and perfectly anti-correlated assets have ρ = -1. Correlation between assets is bad for investors, because it destroys the benefit of diversification. If two assets are perfectly correlated, then you don’t get any lower risk by combining them. On the other hand, if they are perfectly anti-correlated, you can entirely cancel the risk from one with the risk from the other, and get fantastically low risks for great rates of return. RP = wARA + wBRB σP2 = wA2σA2 + wB2σB2 + 2ρwAwBσAσB Let’s suppose that the correlation between A and B is ρ = .2. Since both RP and σP are functions of wA and wB, we can visualize the set of all possible portfolios as a curve on a plot of return-vs-risk: The Markowitz Bullet again! Each point on the curve represents the rate of return and risk of a particular portfolio obtained by mixing A and B. Just like before, some portfolios dominate others and thus should never be used, regardless of your desired level of risk. In particular, for any portfolio that weights asset A (the less risky one) too highly, there are other portfolios that give a higher rate of return with the exact same risk. In other words, you should pretty much never purchase only a low-risk low-return item. If your portfolio consists entirely of Asset A, then by mixing in a little bit of the higher-risk item, you can actually end up massively decreasing your risk and upping your rate of return. Of course, this drop in risk is only because the two assets are not perfectly correlated. And it would be even more extreme if we had negatively correlated assets; indeed with perfect negative correlation (as we saw in the puzzle I started this post with), your risk can drop to zero! Now, we can get our desired portfolio with a risk of 0.6 by just looking at the point on this curve that has σP = 0.6 and calculating which values of wA and wB give us this value. But notice that we haven’t yet used our riskless asset! Can we do better by adding in a little of Asset F to the mix? It turns out that yes, we can. In fact, every portfolio is weakly dominated by some mix of that portfolio and a riskless asset! We can easily calculate what we get by combining a riskless asset with some other asset X (which can in general be a portfolio consisting of multiple assets): RP = wXRX + wFRF σP2 = wX2σX2 + wF2σF2 + 2ρwXwFσXσF = wX2σX2 So σP = wXσX, from which we get that RP = (σPX)RX + (1 – σPX)RF = RF + σP (RX – RF)/σX What we find is that RPP) is just a line whose slope depends on the rate of return and risk of asset X. So essentially, for any risky asset or portfolio you choose, you can easily visualize all the possible ways it can be combined with a risk-free asset by stretching a line from (0, RF) – the risk and return of the risk-free asset – to (sX, RX) – the risk and return of the risky asset. We can even stretch the line beyond this second point by borrowing some of the risk-free asset in order to buy more of the risky asset, which corresponds to a negative weighting wF. So, we have a quadratic curve representing the possible portfolios obtained from two risky assets, and a line representing the possible portfolios obtained from a risky asset and a risk-free asset. What we can do now is consider the line that starts at (0, RF) and just barely brushes against the quadratic curve – the tangent line to the curve that passes through (0, RF). This point where the curves meet is known as the tangency portfolio. Every point on this line is a possible combination of Assets A, B, and F. Why? Well, because the points on the line can be thought of as portfolios consisting of Asset F and the tangency portfolio. And here’s the crucial point: this line is above the curve everywhere except at that single point! What this means is that the combination of A, B, and F dominates combinations of just A and B. For virtually any level of desired risk, you do better by choosing a portfolio on the line than by choosing the portfolio on the quadratic curve! (The only exception to this is the point at which the two curves meet, and in that case you do equally well.) And that is how you optimize your rate of return for a desired level of risk! First generate the hyperbola for portfolios made from your risky assets, then find the tangent to that curve that passes through the point representing the risk-free asset, and then use that line to calculate the optimal portfolio at your chosen level of risk! # Paradoxical Precommitment If in the future we develop the ability to make accurate simulations of other humans, a lot of things will change for the weirder. In many situations where agents with access to simulations of each other interact, a strange type of apparent backward causality will arise. For instance… Imagine that you’re competing in a prisoner’s dilemma against an agent that you know has access to a scarily accurate simulation of you. Prior to your decision to either defect or cooperate, you’re mulling over arguments for one course of action over the other. In such a situation, you have to continuously face the fact that for each argument you come up with, your opponent has already anticipated and taken measures to respond to it. As soon as you think up a new line of reasoning, you must immediately update as if your opponent has just heard your thoughts and adjusted their strategy accordingly. Even if your opponent’s decision has already been made and is set in stone, you have no ability to do anything that your opponent hasn’t already incorporated into their decision. Though you are temporally ahead of them, they are in some sense causally ahead of you. Their decision is a response to your (yet-to-be-made) decision, and your decision is not a response to theirs. (I don’t actually believe and am not claiming that this apparent backwards causality is real backwards causality. The arrow of time still points in only one direction and causality follows suit. But it’s worth it in these situations to act as if your opponent has backwards causation abilities.) When you have two agents that both have access to simulations of the other, things get weird. In such situations, there’s no clear notion of whose decision is a response to the other (as both are responding to each other’s future decision), and so there’s no clear notion of whose decision is causally first. But the question of “who comes first” (in this strange non-temporal sense) turns out to be very important to what strategy the various agents should take! Let’s consider some examples. # Chicken Two agents are driving head-on towards each other. Each has a choice to swerve or to stay driving straight ahead. If they both stay, then they crash and die, the worst outcome for all. If one stays and the other swerves, then the one that swerves pays a reputational cost and the one that stays gains some reputation. And if both swerve, then neither gains or loses any reputation. To throw some numerical values on these outcomes, here’s a payoff matrix: This is the game of chicken. It is an anti-cooperation game, in that if one side knows what the other is going to do, then they want to do the opposite. The (swerve, swerve) outcome is unstable, as both players are incentivized to stay if they know that their opponent will swerve. But so is the (stay, stay) outcome, as this is the worst possible outcome for both players and they both stand to gain by switching to swerve. There are two pure strategy Nash equilibria (swerve, stay) and (stay, swerve), and one mixed strategy equilibria (with the payoff matrix above, it corresponds to swerving with probability 90% and staying with probability 10%). That’s all standard game theory, in a setting where you don’t have access to your opponent’s algorithm. But now let’s take this thought experiment to the future, where each player is able to simulate the other. Imagine that you’re one of the agents. What should you do? The first thought might be the following: you have access to a simulation of your opponent. So you can just observe what the simulation of your opponent does, and do the opposite. If you observe the simulation swerving you stay, and if you observe the simulation staying you swerve. This has the benefit of avoiding the really bad (stay, stay) outcomes, while also exploiting opponents that decide to swerve. The issue is that this strategy is exploitable. While you’re making use of your ability to simulate your opponent, you are neglecting the fact that your opponent is also simulating you. Your opponent can see that this is your strategy, so they know that whatever they decide to play, you’ll play the opposite. So if they decide to tear off their steering wheel to ensure that they will not swerve no matter what, they know that you’ll fall in line and swerve, thus winning them +1 utility and losing you -1 utility. This is a precommitment: a strategy that an agent uses that restricts the number of future choices available to them. It’s quite unintuitive and cool that this sort of tying-your-hands ends up being an enormously powerful weapon for those that have access to it. In other words, if Agent 1 sees that Agent 2 is treating their decision as a fixed fact and responding to it accordingly, then Agent 1 gets an advantage, as they can precommit to staying and force Agent 2 to yield to them. But if Agent 2 now sees Agent 1 as responding to their algorithm rather than the other way around, then Agent 2 benefits by precommitting to stay. If there’s a fact about which agent precommits “first”, then we can conclusively say that this agent does better, as they can force the outcome they want. But again, this is not a temporal first. Suppose that Agent 2 is asleep at the wheel, about to wake up, and Agent 1 is trying to decide what to do. Agent 1 simulates them and sees that once they wake up they will tear out their steering wheel without even considering what Agent 2 does. Now Agent 1’s hand is forced; he will swerve in response to Agent 2’s precommitment, even though it hasn’t yet been made. It appears that for two agents in a chicken-like scenario, with access to simulations of one another, the best action is to precommit as quickly and firmly as possible, with as little regard for their opponents’ precommitments as they can manage (the best-performing agent is the one that tears off their steering wheel without even simulating their opponent and seeing their precommitments, as this agent puts themselves fully causally behind anybody that simulates them). But this obviously just leads straight to the (stay, stay) outcome! This pattern of precommitting, then precommitting to not respond to precommitments, then precommiting to not respond to precommitments to not respond to precommitments, and so on, shows up all over the place. Let’s have another example, from the realm of economics. # Company Coordination and Boycotts In my last post, I talked about the Cournot model of firms competing to produce a homogenous good. We saw that competing firms face a coordination problem with respect to the prices they set: every firm sees it in their rational self-interest to undercut other firms to take their customers, but then other firms follow suit, ending up with the price dropping for everybody. That’s good for consumers, but bad for producers! The process of undercutting and then re-equilibrating continues until the price is at the bare minimum that it takes for a producer to be willing to make the good – essentially just minutely above the cost of production. At this point, producers are making virtually no profit and consumer surplus is maximized. This coordination problem, like all coordination problems, could be solved if only the firms had the ability to precommit. Imagine that the heads of all the companies meet up at some point. They all see the problem that they’re facing, and recognize that if they can stop the undercutting, they’ll all be much richer. So they sign on to a vow to never undercut each other. Of course, signing a piece of paper doesn’t actually restrict your future options. Every company is still just as incentivized as before to break the agreement and undercut their competitors. It helps if they have plausible deniability; the ability to say that their price drop was actually not intended to undercut, but a response to some unrelated change in the market. All that the meeting does is introduce some social cost to undercutting and breaking the vow that wasn’t there before. To actually permanently fix the coordination problem, the companies need to be able to sign on to something that truly and irrevocably ties their hands, giving them no ability to back out later on (equivalent to the tearing-off-the-steering-wheel as a credible precommitment). Maybe they all decide to put some money towards the creation of a final-check mechanism that looks over all price changes and intervenes to stop any changes that it detects to be intended to undercut opponents. This is precommitment in the purer sense of literally removing an option that the firms previously had. And if this type of tying-of-hands was actually possible, then each company would be rationally incentivized to sign on! (Of course, they’d all be looking for ways to cheat the system and break the mechanism at every step, which would make its actual creation a tad bit difficult.) So, if you give all companies the ability to jointly sign on to a credible precommitment to not undercut their opponents, then they will take that opportunity. This will keep prices high and keep profits flowing in to the companies. Producer surplus will be maximized, and consumers will get the short end of the stick. Is there any way for the consumers to fight back? Sure there is! All they need is the ability to precommit as well. Suppose that all consumers are now given the opportunity to come together and boycott any and all companies that precommit to not undercutting each other. If every consumer signs on, and if producers know this, then it’s no longer worth it for them to put in place the price-monitoring mechanism, as they’d just lose all their customers! Of course, the consumers now face their own coordination problem; many of them will still value the product at a price higher than that which is being offered by the companies, even if they’re colluding. And each individual reasons that as long as everybody else is still boycotting the companies, it makes little difference if just one mutually beneficial trade is made with them. So the consumers will themselves face the problem of how to enforce the boycott. But let’s assume that the consumers work this out so that they credibly precommit to never buying from a company that credibly precommits to not undercutting its competitors. Now the market price swings back in their favor, dropping to the cost of production! The consumers win! Whoohoo! But we’re not done yet. It was only worth it for the consumers to sign on to this precommitment because they predicted that the companies would respond to their precommitment. But what if the companies, seeing the boycott-tactic coming, credibly precommit to never yielding to boycotters? Then the consumers, responding to this precommitment, will realize that boycotting will have no effect on prices, and will just cause them all to lose out on mutually beneficial trades! So they won’t boycott, and therefore the producers get the surplus once more. And just like before, this swings back and forth, with the outcome at each stage depending on which agent treats the other agent’s precommitment as being more primal. But if they each run their apparently-best strategy (that is, making their precommitments with no regard to the precommitments of the other party so as to force their hand and place their own precommitments at the beginning of the causal chain), then we end up with the worst possible outcome for all: producers don’t produce anything and consumers don’t consume, and everybody loses out. This question of how agents that can simulate one another AND precommit to courses of action should ultimately behave is something that I find quite puzzling and am not sure how to resolve. # Solving the Linear Cournot Model The Cournot model is a simple economic model used to describe what happens when multiple companies compete with one another to produce some homogenous product. I’ve been playing with it a bit and ended up solving the general linear case. I assume that this solution is already known by somebody, but couldn’t find it anywhere. So I will post it here! It gives some interesting insight into the way that less-than-perfectly-competitive markets operate. First let’s talk about the general structure of the Cournot model. Suppose we have n firms. Each produces some quantity of the product, which we’ll label as $q_1, q_2, ..., q_n$. The total amount of product on the market will be given the label $Q = q_1 + q_2 + ... + q_n$. Since the firms are all selling identical products, it makes sense to assume that the consumer demand function $P(q_1, q_2, ..., q_n)$ will just be a function of the total quantity of the product that is on the market: $P(q_1, q_2, ..., q_n) = P(q_1 + q_2 + ... + q_n) = P(Q)$. (This means that we’re also disregarding effects like customer loyalty to a particular company or geographic closeness to one company location over another. Essentially, the only factor in a consumer’s choice of which company to go to is the price at which that company is selling the product.) For each firm, there is some cost to producing the good. We capture this by giving each firm a cost function $C_1(q_1), C_2(q_2), ..., C_n(q_n)$. Now we can figure out the profit of each firm for a given set of output values $q_1, q_2, ..., q_n$. We’ll label the profit of the kth firm as $\Pi_k$. This profit is just the amount of money they get by selling the product minus the cost of producing the product: $\Pi_k = q_k P(Q) - C_k(q_k)$. If we now assume that all firms are maximizing profit, we can find the outputs of each firm by taking the derivative of the profit and setting it to zero. $\frac{d\Pi_k}{dq_k} = P(Q) + q_k \frac{dP}{dQ} - \frac{dC_k}{dq_k} = 0$. This is a set of n equations with n unknown, so solving this will fully specify the behavior of all firms! Of course, without any more assumptions about the functions $P$ and $C_k$, we can’t go too much further with solving this equation in general. To get some interesting general results, we’ll consider a very simple set of assumptions. Our assumptions will be that both consumer demand and producer costs are linear. This is the linear Cournot model, as opposed to the more general Cournot model. In the linear Cournot model, we write that $P(Q) = a - bQ$ (for some a and b) and $C_k(q_k) = c_k q_k$. As an example, we might have that P(Q) =$100 – $2 × Q, which would mean that at a price of$40, 30 units of the good will be bought total.

The constants $c_k$ represent the marginal cost of production for each firm, and the linearity of the cost function means that the cost of producing the next unit is always the same, regardless of how many have been produced before. (This is unrealistic, as generally it’s cheaper per unit to produce large quantities of a good than to produce small quantities.)

Now we can write out the profit-maximization equations for the linear Cournot model. $\frac{d\Pi_k}{dq_k} = P(Q) + q_k \frac{dP}{dQ} - \frac{dC_k}{dq_k} = a - bQ - b q_k - c_k = 0$. Rewriting, we get $q_k + Q = \frac{a - c_k}{b}$. We can’t immediately solve this for $q_k$, because remember that Q is the sum of all the quantities produced. All n of the quantities we’re trying to solve are in each equation, so to solve the system of equations we have to do some linear algebra!

$2q_1 + q_2 + q_3 + ... + q_n = \frac{a - c_1}{b} \\ q_1 + 2q_2 + q_3 + ... + q_n = \frac{a - c_2}{b} \\ q_1 + q_2 + 2q_3 + ... + q_n = \frac{a - c_2}{b} \\ \ldots \\ q_1 + q_2 + q_3 +... + 2q_n = \frac{a - c_n}{b}$

Translating this to a matrix equation…

$\begin{bmatrix} 2 & 1 & 1 & 1 & 1 & \ldots \\ 1 & 2 & 1 & 1 \\ 1 & 1 & 2 & & \ddots \\ 1 & 1 & & \ddots \\ 1 & & \ddots \\ \vdots \end{bmatrix} \begin{bmatrix} q_1 \\ q_2 \\ q_3 \\ \vdots \\ q_{n-2} \\ q_{n-1} \\ q_n \end{bmatrix} = \frac{1}{b} \begin{bmatrix} a - c_1 \\ a - c_2 \\ a - c_3 \\ \vdots \\ a - c_{n-2} \\ a - c_{n-1} \\ a - c_n \end{bmatrix}$

Now if we could only find the inverse of the first matrix, we’d have our solution!

$\begin{bmatrix} q_1 \\ q_2 \\ q_3 \\ \vdots \\ q_{n-2} \\ q_{n-1} \\ q_n \end{bmatrix} = \begin{bmatrix} 2 & 1 & 1 & 1 & 1 & \ldots \\ 1 & 2 & 1 & 1 \\ 1 & 1 & 2 & & \ddots \\ 1 & 1 & & \ddots \\ 1 & & \ddots \\ \vdots \end{bmatrix} ^{-1} \frac{1}{b} \begin{bmatrix} a - c_1 \\ a - c_2 \\ a - c_3 \\ \vdots \\ a - c_{n-2} \\ a - c_{n-1} \\ a - c_n \end{bmatrix}$

I found the inverse of this matrix by using the symmetry in the matrix to decompose it into two matrices that were each easier to work with:

$\mathcal{I} = \begin{bmatrix} 1 & 0 & 0 & 0 \ldots \\ 0 & 1 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & \ddots \\ 0 \\ \vdots \end{bmatrix}$

$\mathcal{J} = \begin{bmatrix} 1 & 1 & 1 & 1 \ldots \\ 1 & 1 & 1 \\ 1 & 1 & \ddots \\ 1 \\ \vdots \end{bmatrix}$

$\begin{bmatrix} 2 & 1 & 1 & 1 & 1 & \ldots \\ 1 & 2 & 1 & 1 \\ 1 & 1 & 2 & & \ddots \\ 1 & 1 & & \ddots \\ 1 & & \ddots \\ \vdots \end{bmatrix} = \mathcal{I} + \mathcal{J}$

As a hypothesis, suppose that the inverse matrix has a similar form (one value for the diagonal elements, and another value for all off-diagonal elements). This allows us to write an equation for the inverse matrix:

$(\mathcal{I} + \mathcal{J}) (A \mathcal{I} + B \mathcal{J}) = \mathcal{I}$

To solve this, we’ll use the following easily proven identities.

$\mathcal{I} \cdot \mathcal{I} = \mathcal{I} \\ \mathcal{I} \cdot \mathcal{J} = \mathcal{J} \\ \mathcal{J} \cdot \mathcal{I} = \mathcal{J} \\ \mathcal{J} \cdot \mathcal{J} = n \mathcal{J} \\$

$(\mathcal{I} + \mathcal{J}) (A \mathcal{I} + B \mathcal{J}) \\ = A \mathcal{I} + A \mathcal{J} + B \mathcal{J} + nB \mathcal{J} \\ = A \mathcal{I} + \left( A + B(n+1) \right) \mathcal{J} \\ = \mathcal{I}$

$A = 1 \\ A + B(n+1) = 0$

$A = 1 \\ B = - \frac{1}{n+1}$

$(\mathcal{I} + \mathcal{J})^{-1} = \mathcal{I} - \frac{1}{n+1} \mathcal{J} = \frac{1}{n+1} \begin{bmatrix} n & -1 & -1 & -1 & -1 & \ldots \\ -1 & n & -1 & -1 \\ -1 & -1 & n & & \ddots \\ -1 & -1 & & \ddots \\ -1 & & \ddots \\ \vdots \end{bmatrix}$

Alright awesome! Our hypothesis turned out to be true! (And it would have even if the entries in our matrix hadn’t been 1s and 2s. This is a really cool general method to find inverses of this family of matrices.) Now we just use this inverse matrix to solve for the output from each firm!

$\begin{bmatrix} q_1 \\ q_2 \\ q_3 \\ \vdots \\ q_{n-2} \\ q_{n-1} \\ q_n \end{bmatrix} = (\mathcal{I} - \frac{1}{n+1} \mathcal{J}) \ \frac{1}{b} \begin{bmatrix} a - c_1 \\ a - c_2 \\ a - c_3 \\ \vdots \\ a - c_{n-2} \\ a - c_{n-1} \\ a - c_n \end{bmatrix}$

Define: $\mathcal{C} = \sum_{i=1}^{n}{c_i}$

$q_k = \frac{1}{b} (a - c_k - \frac{1}{n+1} \sum_{i=1}^{n}{(a - c_i)}) \\ ~~~~ = \frac{1}{b} (a - c_k - \frac{1}{n+1} (an - \mathcal{C})) \\ ~~~~ = \frac{1}{b} (\frac{a + \mathcal{C}}{n+1} - c_k)$

$Q^* = \sum_{k=1}^n {q_k} \\ ~~~~~ = \frac{1}{b} \sum_{k=1}^n ( \frac{a + \mathcal{C}}{n+1} - c_k ) \\ ~~~~~ = \frac{1}{b} \left( \frac{n}{n+1} (a + \mathcal{C}) - \mathcal{C} \right) \\ ~~~~~ = \frac{1}{b} \left( \frac{n}{n+1} a - \frac{\mathcal{C}}{n+1} \right) \\ ~~~~~ = \frac {an - \mathcal{C}} {b(n+1)}$

$P^* = a - bQ^* \\ ~~~~~ = a - \frac{an - \mathcal{C}}{n+1} \\ ~~~~~ = \frac{a + \mathcal{C}}{n+1}$

$\Pi_k^* = q_k^* P^* - c_k q_k^* \\ ~~~~~ = \frac{1}{b} (\frac{a+\mathcal{C}}{n+1} - c_k) \frac{a + \mathcal{C}}{n+1} - \frac{c_k}{b} (\frac{a + \mathcal{C}}{n+1} - c_k) \\ ~~~~~ = \frac{1}{b} \left( \left( \frac{a + \mathcal{C}}{n+1} \right)^2 - 2c_k\left( \frac{a + \mathcal{C}}{n+1} \right) + c_k^2 \right) \\ ~~~~~ = \frac{1}{b} \left( \frac{a + \mathcal{C}}{n+1} - c_k \right)^2$

And there we have it, the full solution to the general linear Cournot model! Let’s discuss some implications of these results. First of all, let’s look at the two extreme cases: monopoly and perfect competition.

Monopoly: n = 1
$Q^* = \frac{1}{2b} (a - c) \\ P^* = \frac{1}{2} (a + c) \\ \Pi^* = \frac{1}{b} \left( \frac{a - c}{2} \right)^2$

Perfect Competition: n → ∞
$q_k^* \rightarrow \frac{1}{b} (\bar c - c_k) \\ Q^* \rightarrow \frac{1}{b} (a - \bar c) \\ P^* \rightarrow \bar c \\ \Pi^* \rightarrow \frac{1}{b} (\bar c - c_k)^2$

The first observation is that the behavior of the market under monopoly looks very different from the case of perfect competition. For one thing, notice that the price under perfect competition is always going to be lower than the price under monopoly. This is a nice demonstration of the so-called monopoly markup. The quantity $a$ intuitively corresponds to the highest possible price you could get for the product (the most that the highest bidder would pay). And the quantity $c$, the production cost, is the lowest possible price at which the product would be sold. So the monopoly price is the average of the highest price you could get for the good and the lowest price at which it could be sold.

The flip side of the monopoly markup is that less of the good is produced and sold under a monopoly than under perfect competition. There are trades that could be happening (trades which would be mutually beneficial!) which do not occur. Think about it: the monopoly price is halfway between the cost of production and the highest bidder’s price. This means that there are a bunch of people that would buy the product at above the cost of production but below the monopoly price. And since the price they would buy it for is above the cost of production, this would be a profitable exchange for both sides! But alas, the monopoly doesn’t allow these trades to occur, as it would involve lowering the price for everybody, including those who are willing to pay a higher price, and thus decreasing net profit.

Things change as soon as another firm joins the market. This firm can profitably sell the good at a lower price than the monopoly price and snatch up all of their business. This introduces a downward pressure on the price. Here’s the exact solution for the case of duopoly.

Duopoly: n = 2
$q_1 = \frac{1}{3b} (a - 2c_1 + c_2) \\ q_2 = \frac{1}{3b} (a + c_1 - 2c_2) \\ Q^* = \frac{1}{3b} (2a - c_1 - c_2) \\ P^* = \frac{1}{3} (a + c_1 + c_2) \\ \Pi_1^* = \frac{1}{3b} (a - 2c_1 + c_2)^2 \\ \Pi_2^* = \frac{1}{3b} (a + c_1 - 2c_2)^2 \\$

Interestingly, in the duopoly case the market price still rests at a value above the marginal cost of production for either firm. As more and more firms enter the market, competition pushes the price down further and further until, in the limit of perfect competition, it converges to the cost of production.

The implication of this is that in the limit of perfect competition, firms do not make any profit! This may sound a little unintuitive, but it’s the inevitable consequence of the line of argument above. If a bunch of companies were all making some profit, then their price is somewhere above the cost of production. But this means that one company could slightly lower its price, thus snatching up all the customers and making massively more money than its competitors. So its competitors will all follow suit, pushing down their prices to get back their customers. And in the end, all the firms will have just decreased their prices and their profits, even though every step in the sequence appeared to be the rational and profitable action by each firm! This is just an example of a coordination problem. If the companies could all just agree to hold their price fixed at, say, the monopoly price, then they’d all be better off. But each individual has a strong monetary incentive to lower their price and gather all the customers. So the price will drop and drop until it can drop no more (that is, until it has reached the cost of production, at which point it is no longer profitable for a company to lower their price).

This implies that in some sense, the limit of perfect competition is the best possible outcome for consumers and the worst outcome for producers. Every consumer that values the product above the cost of its production will get it, and they will all get it at the lowest possible price. So the consumer surplus will be enormous. And companies producing the product make no net profit; any attempt to do so immediately loses them their entire customer base. (In which case, what is the motivation for the companies to produce the product in the first place? This is known as the Bertrand paradox.)

We can also get the easier-to-solve special case where all firms have the same cost of production.

Equal Production Costs
$\forall k (c_k = c)$
$q_k^* = \frac{1}{n+1} \frac{a - c}{b} \\ Q^* = \frac{n}{n+1} \frac{a - c}{b} \\ P^* = \frac{a + nc}{n + 1} \\ \Pi^* = \frac{1}{b} \left( \frac{a - c}{n+1} \right)^2$

It’s curious that in the Cournot model, prices don’t immediately drop to production levels as soon you go from a monopoly to a duopoly. After all, the intuitive argument I presented before works for two firms: if both firms are pricing the goods at any value above zero, then each stands to gain by lowering the price a slight bit and getting all the customers. And this continues until the price settles at the cost of production. We didn’t build in any ability of the firms to collude to the model, so what gives? What the Cournot model tells us is certainly more realistic (we don’t expect a duopoly to behave like a perfectly competitive market), but where does this realism come from?

The answer is that in a certain sense we did build in collusion between firms from the start, in the form of agreement on what price to sell at. Notice that our model did not allow different firms to set different prices. In this model, firms compete only on quantity of goods sold, not prices. The price is set automatically by the consumer demand function, and no single individual can unilaterally change their price. This constraint is what gives us the more realistic-in-character results that we see, and also what invalidates the intuitive argument I’ve made here.

One final observation. Consider the following procedure. You line up a representative from each of the n firms, as well as the highest bidder for the product (representing the highest price at which the product could be sold). Each of the firms states their cost of production (the lowest they could profitably bring the price to), and the highest bidder states the amount that he values the product (the highest price at which he would still buy it). Now all of the stated costs are averaged, and the result is set as the market price of the good. Turns out that this procedure gives exactly the market price that the linear Cournot model predicts! This might be meaningful or just a curious coincidence. But it’s quite surprising to me that the slope of the demand curve ($b$) doesn’t show up at all in the ultimate market price, only the value that the highest bidder puts on the product!