Takashi Hashiyama, president of Maspro Denkoh Corporation, an electronics company based outside of Nagoya, Japan, could not decide whether Christie’s or Sotheby’s should sell the company’s art collection, which is worth more than $20 million, at next week’s auctions in New York.
…he resorted to an ancient method of decision-making that has been time-tested on playgrounds around the world: rock breaks scissors, scissors cuts paper, paper smothers rock.
In Japan, resorting to such games of chance is not unusual. "I sometimes use such methods when I cannot make a decision," Mr. Hashiyama said in a telephone interview. "As both companies were equally good and I just could not choose one, I asked them to please decide between themselves and suggested to use such methods as rock, paper, scissors."
Christie’s won, and here is the full story, via Jason Kottke.
What’s to really stop one of them from bidding down the other? Loss of prestige business, a race to the bottom, marginal costs for adding more paintings to the night’s list (or displacing lesser works; bundling costs), interest losses for delaying those sales? Yeah, what’s the real cost of losing business we’re talking about here–certainly not $2.5M. There are people who kill for that amount.
Bear, ninja, cowboy is way funner than rock, paper, scissors.
(Ninja catches cowboy’s bullet in his teeth.)
“Flipping a coin is far more efficient than rock-paper-scissors. There are no ties when you flip a coin.”
With a little practice I can get a flipped coin to come up the way I want it. But when done the Japanese
way at least it is hard to cheat with rock paper scissors. It’s also possible for more than two people to
participate. Also, the capital costs are lower.
From personal experience, I tend to use random decison makers (roll a die or flip a coin) when the the anticipated costs of determining which option is superior is greater the anticipated difference between the optimal outcome and mean outcome of the random choice – I find this particularly useful for avoiding arugments with my girlfriend over what to have for dinner, since we tend to insist on deferring to the other party.
If 1/2 the benefit of a reduced price due to additional rounds of bidding between the auction houses didn’t offset the costs of the additional negotiations and holding the art in the interim period, then it was a good choice. If these costs were small compared to the benefits, Ross’s strategy would be a much better choice, but since the options were very close to equal in Mr. Hashiyama’s mind, minimizing negotiation and research costs by a quick, random, winner-take-all chosing mechanism may have been the rational thing to do.
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