The CEO of the software firm Evernote, Phil Libin, made headlines with a policy of offering Evernote employees a thousand dollars cash for taking a vacation. This sounds like a reasonable approach to getting more employees to take vacation, but from a game-theoretic perspective it’s actually misguided. Increasing the cash on the table in the prisoner’s dilemma, for instance, misses the point: the change doesn’t do anything to alter the bad equilibrium. If a million-dollar heist ends up with both thieves in jail, so does a ten-million-dollar heist. The problem isn’t that vacations aren’t
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