On Sun, Jan 28, 2007 at 05:09:05PM -0500, Seth Ruskin wrote: > >From: Marc Hartstein <marc.hartstein@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > > Wow. That's a great use of semantics, but to me you actually didn't say > anything to explain why your system is an improvement. You really didn't > even explain the difference between banking and hoarding, as this is a > token economy, and you're purchasing your reward with these tokens either > way. It's just in yours, I need two types of tokens. Thanks. I'm sorry if the message got lost in the semantics, though. I'll try again. Neither economy is a pure token economy. They involve both tokens and dollars with rules about how the two interact. The current economy can be refactored as: Every item in the Stores has a cost. Most items have a cost in dollars. Some items have a cost of 1 Point + (point price - 1) dollars. Points can be spent in place of dollars anywhere the carrot symbol appears, and for shipping. Because points are dual-purpose (they apply both to point cost and dollar cost), every time you choose to spend points as dollars you reduce the opportunity to spend points as points. Since spending points as points is the only way to get certain items, there is an incentive not to spend points as dollars when making purchases. My economy can be refactored as: Every item in the Stores has a cost. Most items have a cost in dollars. Some items have a cost of X Karma + Y dollars. Points can be spent in place of dollars anywhere the carrot symbol appears, and for shipping. Notice that points are now single-purpose. They substitute for dollars. The incentive is to spend them on rewars. Karma is single-purpose. It lets you get stuff you can't get any other way. However, that's all Karma does. You spend Karma on getting stuff. Whether you choose to spend it on getting stuff now or later or what stuff, you're not trading spending Karma off against spending something else in its place. Keep in mind that, as I've said before, I prefer to think of the point as the basic unit of the economy. However, I think my refactoring makes it clearer what I'm looking at, and the two are functionally equivalent except in terms of perception on the part of the participants. There are a few competing goals of the Points system, and I think they're overloading a single class of points in a way which creates strange interactions. Points are a few different kinds of reward: - a discount on purchases of "cool stuff" (not games) - a discount on shipping costs - the right to buy certain items But when you use them as one of the first two, it reduces your ability to use them as the third. In a weird way in that *when* you spend the points affects *how* you can spend them. Again, it's the fact that I can spend X points + Y dollars in one way to get two items, but there's another way in which I cannot spend X points + Y dollars (with the same values for X and Y) to get the same two items which bothers me. The same cost (X points + Y dollars) should be able to get me the same reward (two items plus separate shipping costs for each) regardless of whether I spend M points and N dollars followed by X-M points and Y-N dollars, or if I spend M+1 points and N-1 dollars followed by X-(M+1) points and Y-(N-1) dollars. Notice how both ways I'm spending X points + Y dollars total across two purchases, and that the total cost of both purchases is the same both times. Why do I get different results? Karma seems like an elegant solution. Now I'm spending X points + Y dollars + Z Karma. Yes, there's an extra complication. But I can spend M points + N dollars + K1 Karma followed by X-M points + Y-N dollars + K2 Karma, or spend M+1 points + N-1 dollars + K1 Karma followed by X-(M+1) points + Y-(N-1) dollars + K2 Karma and get the same results. Do you see how this is an improvement? (Yes, I recognize, there may be other ways in which it's *not* an improvement. But I'm trying to answer the question I've been asked, which is what I'm trying to accomplish here/why I think this is an improvement.) So I would prefer two kinds of points (even though that's more complicated), because that allows me to have: Points, which give a discount on the cost of items with the carrot symbol and on shipping. Karma, which gives the right to buy certain items. Now the Points as dollar substitutes are distinct from the points as right to buy certain items. However, I'd prefer to turn this thought around and think of dollars as point substitutes. This last change is purely psychological, to encourage thinking of reward items as rewards rather than as purchases. > Moreover, as far as I can tell, I have less incentive not to bank/hoard > under your system because I can't offset the token cost. Under the current > system, I can choose not to forego today's reward and still have enough > tokens for a future reward, as long as I have some money available offset > the cost to LL to give me that reward. Under yours, I must hoard my tokens > if I want the future reward. Yes, what I'm really doing is turning Points into pseudo-dollars and creating a smaller pure token economy on the side. I have tokens which are spent only on getting rewards which can only be gotten by spending tokens on them. It has all the advantages and disadvantages of a token economy. However, the "reward" is the "right to buy an item". I can then purchase it using some combination of pseudo-dollars and real dollars, as I see fit. I think it's better than the current economy because the current economy uses points as both pseudo-dollars *and* tokens, with the token cost for all items being 1 token. I also like it because in most of the normal use cases it will work the same as the current setup. It eliminates and edge-condition and creates more room to shift numbers to create incentives. (Setting all Karma costs to 1 creates a situation identical to the current setup except that you are assumed to have always made the correct decision about how to allocate points vs. dollars.)
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