Chicago researcher formalizes situationships with game theory and Bayesian persuasion
steeltroops_ai · x · 2026-11-09
A viral paper by Ethan Bilderbeek (University of Chicago, computational & applied math) models "situationships" as a two-player game where each agent chooses to commit or stay vague.
Key results:
- When fear of rejection outweighs the gain from a label, the situationship is the risk-dominant equilibrium: even if both strictly prefer to be together, with any small uncertainty about the other's feelings no one asks. "No one is being irrational. The equilibrium is."
- Mixed signals are optimal persuasion: a sender preferring the status quo retains the receiver with probability just above the threshold (e.g. 0.6 vs 0.5 for full disclosure).
- "When to ask" becomes a free-boundary optimal stopping problem with a closed-form value function, and waiting costs up to 2.95x its price in the commitment-as-real-option interpretation.
- A mutual-reversal mechanism makes truthful reporting weakly dominant and attains the information-theoretic lower bound on leakage.
Equal parts meme and rigorous math, spreading on X as a novelty paper.
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