Golden Balls

For the last month or so, my apartment has been plagued by addiction—addiction to what may be one of the most entertaining shows in baking show history: The Great British Baking Show. While this is a wonderful show that should be seen by all of us across the pond, there’s another British masterpiece that I think we would enjoy far more. Golden Balls.

Golden Balls brings game theory to life—literally. Golden Balls is a British game show based on the prisoner’s dilemma. Except it has a twist. Instead of the individual contestants being placed in separate environments, they are placed at a table directly across from one another… in front of a live studio audience. The game has a cash prize and two contestants. The allocation of the cash prize is determined by two decisions made by the contestants. Each contestant has two options: split or steal the pot. If both players choose to split, they split the entire pot. If one player chooses to split and the other to steal, the player that chose to steal gets the entire pot. However, if both choose to steal, both get nothing. So basically, your classic prisoner’s dilemma situation.

But the twist is that these people aren’t making this decision separately. There sitting 3 feet away from one another and are encouraged to negotiate—let the mind games BEGIN! Unsurprisingly so, this set up is the main source of entertainment. In many economics classes we have explored the idea that when allowed to discuss we would be one step closer to minimizing issues of imperfect information. But that’s not necessarily the case. The problem here is that we are working with humans who admittedly have incentives to lie, cheat, and steal—especially if they don’t have established trust with the other player. In this game, they don’t have that incentive. The contestants are complete strangers to one another. The challenge here is getting the players to trust each other.  

In the clip above, one player attempts to convince the other to choose “split,” promising that he will split the pot after the show ends. But what incentive does that player have to trust him? He very well could just go back on his word, ignore the agreement, and go off on his merry way with the whole pot. Besides a very steadfast moral compass, the contestants have little to no loyalty to one another. Without that loyalty, the power of persuasion becomes the imperative—and there, the strategies are endless.