The Blog Poster's Dilemma

I like short blog posts, you like short blog posts, we all like short blog posts. But for some reason, even though we've been told otherwise, there are some long blog posts on this site.  My first thought was just that this obvious error could be explained by members of this class being UVA students. We like to overachieve (even though it's bad for us) and we just can't stand the idea of putting less than our full genius out into the interwebs! That's one thought, but I don't want to live that cynically so I looked for another answer and I found one. It's a prisoner's dilemma!!!!!!

These blog posts factor into our grades through the mid-term and final exam. Studying them takes time, and because we all have limited study time long posts limit the amount of time you can spend studying other things. Because your study time is more spread out, you may do more poorly, which advantages others via the distribution. The prisoner's dilemma I'm about to describe is simplified to only two participants (because I wouldn't know how to do it with 30 but imagine how much worse it is when 30 people are all doing this same thing!!!)

	Short	Long
Short	10/10	4/12
Long	12/4	5/5

If we both post short posts that is ideal because we both only have short posts to study and can do better on the test.  I can make myself better off and you worse off by posting a longer post (you have to study more and you doing worse improves my performance in the distribution). You then have an incentive to post a long post so that you even out the distribution. As a result, we each have the incentive to make long posts no matter what the other person posts, BUT THAT'S THE WORST OUTCOME BECAUSE LONG POSTS TAKE TIME TO STUDY.  Hopefully next year's students read this post and heed my warning.