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The Bud Light boycott continues. Anheuser-Busch is responding by sponsoring vet groups and commissioning ads that "will play heavily on themes such as football and country music". A glance at conservative comment sections reveals a few vocal consumers vowing that no amount of patriotic pandering will change their mind and that they will continue the boycott no matter what.
I am reminded of this apocryphical exchange between two Chinese officers late for battle:
That is to say, a proper incentive structure should not only contain costs for injecting woke politics into business but also rewards for backpedalling.
On the other hand, the undisputed champions of pushing business and people around do not seem too keen on accepting apology. Or do they? The bottom line seems to be: If your public kowtow is more valuable for the propagation of the movement than the display of your head on a spike, you may get another chance (unless and untilyou even slightly step out of line again).
This seems ideal because the incentives for the victim thus contain an effectiveness criterion. Mouthing platitudes is not enough, you need to actually further the cause of your attackers. The uncertainty ups the ante for the victim.
On the other other hand, woke shaming campaigns might not be the ideal blue print for convervatives, given their lack of clout and high-brow media capture.
I disagree, you're only thinking of the single iteration game. In a game with many iterations it's far more important to make an example of them. Go woke, go broke - no exceptions.
Tit-for-tat with forgiving is a better strategy than switching to defect bot.
No it isn't. The correct response to DefectBot is to defect forever. Tit for Tat with possible forgiveness is a strategy that can interrupt mis-inputs ruining communication between otherwise-cooperative people. If you cooperate three times in a row and your enemy defects three times in a row, then they've proven who they are and you can mark them down as "Always Defect" and not a good agent allied with you that had a technical glitch.
Or, to take this out of the game layer, strike 1 was the initial campaign, strike 2 was the weak-ass 'wait for this to blow over' and not immediately and publicly firing the execs in question, and strike 3 was not immediately and clearly expressing how they had screwed up in language comprehensible to their core audience. It was revealed that Bud Lite's makers are fundamentally opposed to the values of its mean consumer; this is the result, and should be the result.
Even tit-for-tat without forgiving is better than that. You wait for the other to play cooperate and cooperate next turn. The goal is to reach a C-C equilibrium, not a D-D one. Otherwise you really do trap your opponent in the defectbot role forever, even when he wants out.
They play cooperate for at least one round.
In less abstract terms: They give you a credible, costly signal that they're no longer interested in defecting against you. You can argue that camo-cans and country music ads are neither credible nor costly enough, but announcing that you will from now on be a defect bot against them no matter what is not a sound strategy.
A couple of good counterpoints have been raised in this thread:
Beat up the biggest meanie in prison: This is the first right-wing protest that has legs. The right needs to prove that they can sink an opponent.
Pour encourager les autres: The right needs to send a signal to other players that they are not to be screwed with. This is more valuable than cooperation with Bud.
Don't sell yourself short: The right can't give in right away because that sends the signal that defecting against them is a mistake that can easily be corrected.
But then again, forgiveness can be advantageous. Take the Heckler&Koch example. Their social media manager went on a "as a woman" tirade, was subsequently relieved of her duties and HK announced that they don't "do identity politics". The right quickly backed off and celebrated the move. That's what I mean by rewarding backpedalling.
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DefectBot never co-operates; you cannot reach a C-C equilibrium because DefectBot always defects. Every time you co-operate with DefectBot, you lose more. So the correct response to defectbot is always Defect.
That only holds if you're sure that the other player is actually an always-defector. Otherwise your strategy is a self-fulfilling prophecy. In any case, tit-for-that against an actual defect bot does result in always defecting yourself. But it also contains the possibility to convert what you thought was a defectbot into a cooperating partner.
I'm saying that ...D-D-C-?
should be responded with
...D-D-D-C, not ...D-D-D-D
I always liked D until the other party has picked C one more time than they picked D while you were still picking C.
I think the point is from my perspective ABInbev hasn't picked C once, they're still picking D but using more diplomatic language.
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