Earlier this month, Sri Lankan(SL) Cricket Board had asked their players to return back home by May, 2011. Apparently, the Sri Lanka cricket board wants the team to focus more on the England Tour ahead instead of IPL.

The call from the country is blatant that they would want their players to return home for the practice, suspending IPL for a while. This decision would impact the IPL in what might be called a "significant game changer". With teams losing out on few of the key players ( Mumbai Indians without the Malinga, Kochi Tuskers and Deccan Chargers without their captains during the tournament), the team's balance might just get tipped.

Amidst all these, "tu-tu main-main" [http://dict.hinkhoj.com/meaning-of-tu-tu%20main-main-in-english.html] between the players and the boards.I felt that there was more to it than what meets the eye -- I felt that it was a torrid move by the SL to somehow hit back at India, for the alleged "ill-treatment" of the SL president during the World Cup Final -- and IPL, IPLs Big Bucks and the plausible state of it 'minus' SL players might have seemed like the only way in which SL Board could have it easy to give a 'cold-shoulder' to India.

The whole scenario reminded me of the multi player generalization of the Prisoner's dilemma (PD) -- with dilemmas surrounding multiple players and it ofcourse gets difficult to get rational,more so, in getting the selfish agents to cooperate for their common good.

Just when I was trying to segregate the in-roads and aggregate the flaws in this decision, I stumbled upon a view from elsewhere, which said that the entire situation might suffer "big time" if there is a formation of cartels. As we know Cartelisation[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel] is said to be the best way to break Nash Equilibrium. Sangakarra, Jayawardene, Dilshan, Mathews, Randiv, Malinga, and Kulasekara form the core of the Sri Lankan national team. Still, the only way they can win this battle is by coming together. But, the cartel will be broken if even one of them defects. With a whole lot of discussions going on between these players, it of-course, is congruent to the mutiplayer variant of prisoner's dielemma, the game of commons.

The franchise owners will definitely not be happy with this. The aggrieved owners include are likely to support the players’ cartel.

The Sri Lankan ministry, on the other hand, would like to form their own cartel with anti-BCCI boards like PCB and ECB. And, they would like to identify the weak link in the players’ cartel and lure him to defect. National captaincy could be a significant incentive and Dilshan could be their target. But, given that the ministry has acted on ego rather than financial considerations, they may be entering the battle with little preparation.

While, in the ordinary , universal cooperation is a pareto-optimal outcome, i.e., there is no outcome in which each player is at least as well off and some are better off. But in the commons game the only pareto optimal outcomes are those of minimally effective cooperation. Whether universal cooperation is nevertheless desirable may depend on the nature of the choices involved.

None, the less, the entire story now seems to have ended with not much "game theory masala" to taste. But, it was nice retrospecting, none the less :)

My thoughts leave
In mute protest
Of being confused
Until am left with
A blank expression

-!nversed Poignancy!

In my college, its a really common ritual to *more than* occasionally share PJs and P+iJs (Poor and Complex Jokes) to the mailing list..

However, as matter of time came a sort of metamorphism that made each of those so called *comedy* look like nothing more than a greater piece of sarcasm, greater insult and greater offensiveness ...
Thus, the phrases such as "your joke was awfully offensive", "your joke hurt my feelings and sentiments", etc soon became a word of mouth and the mouth of the words..

Although, at first things go brushed away easily, more so, because of the excessive citations and pointers towards statements like *ah!, I was just being political correct* or *Oh!, guess you are overly sensitive*. But, still the Jokes continued, and continued with some discontinuity, of-course...

As time passed and "work-flows" in terms of mind-maturities - the entire process of the *politically correctness* and *overly sensitiveness* pointing citations for once came hand to hand with "was (s)he really hurt?" and "oh, may be (s)he was hurt .." sort of emotions.

This said and done -- Today, I was kind of IETising (Idiotic Emission of Thoughts) about why such misunderstandings happen or is bound to happen and kind of felt that "Game Theory" might just give an answer to this sort of a dilemma..

For the uninitiated..the sender of the mail can either intend it to be a joke or serious. In turn, the receiver can either interpret the email as a joke or serious. There are four possible outcomes:

–If the sender meant it as a joke, and receiver took it as a joke, then both get a good laugh

–If the sender meant it as a joke, and receiver took it as seriously, then the emails would stop until receiver learned it was sarcasm–then they'd have a good laugh

–If the sender meant it seriously, and receiver took it as a joke, then receiver would probably get in trouble with the college’s residential staff

–If the sender meant it seriously, and receiver took it seriously, then both move on without incident

The game thus becomes..

The chart illustrates the dynamics of the game: there are three good outcomes and only a single bad outcome–when a serious statement is taken as a joke. The good outcomes lead to a chuckle or a maintenance of status quo.

As a point of matter, the bad outcome can be really bad. I know people who have gotten in serious trouble with friends and they have had to attend sensitivity training to avoid being kicked out of the apparent *friendships*.

Therefore, the game suggests that it’s best to take most statements as serious. There is almost no risk to taking statements seriously because either it will be a correct assessment or it will get resolved on a double-check that the other person was sarcastic. This avoids the event of a blow-up entirely.

Conclusion: investigate unclear jokes and sarcasm until you’re sure. I wish many had known this in much before they had gotten themselves into a bit of trouble. I hope this post can spare someone else the same hassle.

What say?!