power and negotiation and game theory

Tyeliah's taking a class called Power and Negotiation. Every week she has to negotiate. Sometime soon she has to write a three page paper about a negotiation she has recently done outside of class - she wanted to use negotiating for free movie tickets when the movie theater audio was playing at mute level, but i don't think she'll be able to write 3 pages on that - so she'll probably write about negotiating with me for who's doing the dishes

Anyways, one of her negotiations took place as a team negotiating with some other team where each team had the option to cooperate or screw the other team. Interestingly, the goal was for the two teams to maximize their combined points, not for one team to beat the other so it seems like the incentive would be to cooperate ... but apparently the incentive to beat the other team won out and most teams tried to screw each other.

In my various internet wanderings I read about game competitions where people write computer programs that pursue different gaming strategies.

In one-off games, almost everyone ends up screwing the other team, but in repeat games the incentive is to cooperate until the last game and then screw the other team on the last game ... but the other team knows this so they screw your team the game before the last game ... but the other team knows this so ... and so on ...

It turns out the best strategy is tit for tat ... do whatever your opponent did on their last turn.

4 months ago this blog post would have been fully sourced with links to interesting articles about game theory and deep, silly thoughts about what it means that the tit for tat strategy is the maximal strategy and so on and so forth ... now I have a job and all I want to do with my weekends is lounge on the couch and take walks outside on sunny days not look up interesting articles for your edification... such is life...

Spring Classes

Tyler and I have both decided to write a post in the hopes that we will push through the inertia and get back to blogging something approaching regularly.

Spring classes began yesterday. Essentially all my classes are electives this semester and it has not been easy choosing them. However, I have pretty much decided and unless something changes (somewhat likely) these are the classes I will be taking...

1.273/1.274 Supply Chain Planning/Design

1.261 Case studies in logistics and supply chain management

15.012 Applied macro and international economics

15.665 Power and Negotiation

ESD.930 (don't know the title - its a project based class on procurement)

Tiger teams - Project based class, I'll be doing a project with EnerNOC

ProSem - Each week executives speak about leadership and operations

Gender and Poverty - A women's studies class that is going to be a ton of work for no credit

and that's the list. 2 of the classes are only half a semester long so my load the second half will be a lot lighter.

Inertia perhaps being overcome, I will write more about the classes once we have done more than go over the syllabus.

On Laziness

So, sometime about 4 months ago I wrote a post about something or other and I was going to enliven the debate with some silly thoughts or other ...

and then nothing...

Rest assured, this is a common blogging trend. Peruse the various LGO/LFM blogs of the past and present and you will see a multitude of posts about how - "oh, I've been so bad about updating, I'll do better"

As my 7 foot chinese differential equations professor once said - "Never Better! Always Worse!"*

So I won't say that I'll do better. I promise that I will do better, worse or the same.

... and its not as though there weren't actual good reasons for the lack of blogging other than laziness (although that one predominates). First and foremost, I got a job. I now work as a transmission policy analyst for one of the largest electric companies in the world. Yay me.

I got the job about a week after the last post and proceeded to binge on video games until my job started. You see, I couldn't play too much video games** while I didn't have a job because then I'd be thinking - "Oh my goodness, I can't believe I'm one of those people who plays video games instead of looking for jobs ... what a loser I am ..."

But once I had the job, I could do anything ... including going to St. Louis and wearing a gorilla suit, which I did***.

So I started a job. Other things that happened in the intervening 4 months:

I got married****
Tyeliah got married****
We went to Paris and London
I got Superbowl tickets (from my father for christmas)
My favorite team (the Saints) won the NFC championship and is going to the Superbowl!
Tyeliah went crazy taking 8 classes and nearly lost her marbles (she did really well in the classes though)
Tyeliah semi-relaxed during the break and then took a 2 week trip to see factories around the country
Tyeliah forgot last semester's craziness and decided to take 10 classes - which she then dropped to 9 as a compromise (although its really only 8 she says cause she's auditing one and maybe its really only 7 because ...)

Alright, more to come later ... maybe.

*said in regards to 90% of the class failing the 2nd test (though not yours truly) - full quote, you have to imagine a chinese accent and a 7 foot rail thin chinese man who loves elvis to get the full effect - "People always say, give me second chance, I do better ... No! Never Better! Always Worse!"
**Tyeliah believes it should be "playing too many video games" but my reading is that "video games" is continuous object - as in, "I am playing video games a lot" not "I am playing a large number of video games" which would imply that I played many different video games whereas I want to imply that I played a few video games a large amount of time ... thus I defend using too much video games ... also, I wrote that first and I don't like to change things after I write
***the gorilla suit was worn at the appropriate gorilla suit wearing time - Halloween - and by the way, gorilla suits are really warm
****in case you were wondering, we married each other at a very small ceremony on the eastern shore in Maryland. It was wonderful.

Re-Oriented

When Ms. Duncan began the LGO program in June, she went through a rigorous orientation program - something called the Universe Within that lasted for a week and ended with a trip to some island in the bay where blindfolds were dispensed and much reflecting on blindfolded activities took place... Or so Ms. Duncan tells me.

When yours truly first went to grad school oh so long ago (2 years) my orientation was about 3 hours and ended with drinking on the roof of the building - but then again I was a lowly liberal arts and sciences students so there was less to orient me toward.

MIT stands firm behind a one week-long orientation per degree policy and as Ms. Duncan is getting two degrees (for those of you who have forgotten - an MBA and an SM in civil and environmental engineering) she was in line for 2 orientations - one in June and one when the Sloanies arrived in late august so that she could get to know her fellow Pacific Oceanites - see previous post (as Ms. Duncan did not deign to inform you, dear reader, it is left to me to deliver the news of the Sloan schools failings at geography - there are 6 Sloan Oceans - Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Baltic, Caribbean and Mediterranean - somewhere the MIT administration's 4th grade teachers are pulling their hair out).

There was much revelry and blindfolding ... and building of rafts ... and they rode on a boat through the bay and I got to go ...

Having endured that most horrendous of orientations (peace corps training) I adopt the motto of the less that can be said of orientations, the better... so I'll only mention one more thing that was common to both the June and August orientings.

The Beer Game!

Both less and more exciting than it sounds - in a way it corresponds to that historic Homer quote (the simpson, not the greek) - (the) Beer (game) - the solution to and cause of all of life's (read supply chain's) problems. Ms. Duncan didn't actually play the beer game during the august orientation opting instead with some of her LGO colleagues to go and drink actual beer instead of playing at producing it.

But there is much to learn from the game so I'll try to explain it. However, the best way to figure it out is to actually go and play it yourself - which you can do right here.

For a brief overview, the beer game is played with "teams" of 4 (I use the quotes as there is little actual communication between team members) - a retailer, a wholesaler, a distributor and a factory - together comprising a supply chain for cases of beer - hence the Beer Game. Teams are ranked based on combined final amount of money they lost (the less the better, obviously).

Like many academic activities, the Beer Game - much to Ms. Duncan's delight - was created at MIT as a supply chain management education device and is now played throughout the MBA world and the corporate management education world (Ms. Duncan is also a huge fan of the MIT created Little's Law - which has something to with stats or operations engineering - it may be little, but it's a law - so she tells me).

Pretty much all the players do is fill an order (the retailer fills the customer's order, the wholesaler fills the retailer's order ...) and place an order (the factory decides what to produce, the distributor orders from the factory ...). Everybody starts with 12 beers of inventory. You lose money by having inventory and by failing to fill orders. One other thing - the "customer" is a pack of notecards with an order amount written on them - the retailer flips them over before each turn to find out the customer demand.

Simple yes? Go and play and then come back - spoilers are ahead.

In theory the game is fairly simple, but there are delays between the time an order makes it to the person one level up the supply chain and there are delays between the time an order is filled and the time an order arrives - so if the retailer makes an order in week 1, the wholesaler gets the order in week 3 and the goods get delivered to the retailer in week 5 ... or something like that - you get the idea.

Thus much havoc is created through a bull whip effect that leads to huge backlogs in orders and then huge inventory levels. The different players on the team often get into fights ("Why didn't you make more beer!!" so the distributor yelled at Ms. Duncan the factory operator) because of the madness and most people think that the customers are ordering wildly different amounts from turn to turn.

They're not though. They start ordering 4 for a few weeks and then they switch to 8 and they stay at 8 the rest of the time. This switch combined with the delays and the desire to lower inventory leads directly to the bull whip effect.

Pretty much everyone does horrible. People who have played before and thus know that the orders are just going to be 8 for pretty much the entire time - they often do worse.

There is much to be learned from the beer game - I shall ponder it deeply and come down from my academic mountain later and draw silly conclusions.

Pacific Cranes

So I have a new team.

It is sad not to be in class with a lot of the other LGO students, but I am getting to know my new classmates the Sloanies. The entire class of 2011 is divided into 6 oceans, I am in the Pacific which means that I take all of my MBA core classes with the people of the Pacific. Within each ocean, we are divided into birds, so my core team are the Pacific Cranes. We are a diverse group in many respects. We have...

Jen - former director of admissions for the University of Hawaii business school

Carlo - an Italian who is still somehow running his own business while attending classes

Lynn - from Thailand, she is a wiz at accounting, she is sponsored by the cement company she was working for before coming to Sloan

Jeff - from California most recently, he took class in the MIT Engineering school before coming here

John - went to the Naval Academy, and was working in DC before Sloan

Ramiro - an Argentinean who loves to discuss politics and is somehow related to Che Guevara

Like I said, a diverse group - except that Jeff, John and I were all working for defense companies before coming to school.

This being business school, Carlo made us a logo...

le semestre d'automne commence

Ms. Duncan recently began the fall semester. She's taking 8 classes ... you read correctly, 8 classes. For comparison, during my recent master's program, I took 3-4 classes a semester, so 8 is pretty ridiculous. I can't really tell you how many credits she's taking as MIT is of the opinion that ordinary university procedures are beneath them so instead of the usual credit system (based on the hours of classes one takes per a week) they have a unit system. Ms. Duncan is taking 68 units - which is supposed to mean that she spends 68 hours per week attending or doing homework/projects for these classes.

As Ms. Duncan is getting both an MBA and an SM (another ridiculous MITism) in Civil and Environmental Engineering she has to take more than just the business school core (people in business school at MIT are referred to as Sloanies - for some reason whenever I hear this term I think of Newsies and I picture them as 10 year olds in shorts and bowties and suspenders running around downtown handing out newspapers and singing - I haven't actually seen Newsies but this is what comes to mind).

The business school core is as follows (each are 9 units):

Organizational Processes

Communication

Economics

Financial Accounting

Data, Models and Decisions (DMD)

Ms. Duncan doesn't actually take DMD as her summer stats and systems optimization courses covered similar material. In addition to these 5, Sloanies also have to take either Finance or Marketing (I think my granddad once told that I should definitely take one of these two classes - I didn't listen - perhaps that's why I'm still looking for a job). Most LGO students (no catchy nickname as of yet but some people are pushing for LeGOs) are also taking one of these two this semester (they are required to take at least one sometime during the program) but Ms. Duncan opted instead for more engineering now.

Her engineering courses:

Logistic Systems (12 units)

Design for Sustainability (6 units)

Logistics and Supply Chain Management (12 units)

LeGos also have to take a Pro-Seminar (2 units) "class" which is really just a lecture series with fancy pants business people although they are trying to get the Houston Rockets GM to come speak (also known as "Dork Elvis" according to ESPN's the Sports Guy) so that could be cool.

So that's what she's up against - formidable (say it with a french accent - 4-me-dahb).

Ms. Duncan has promised to post more on the specifics of each class later although she'll likely be less than completely honest (she hates one of the classes but she won't let me say which ... harumph).

In other school related news, tyeliah has finally received all of her grades from the summer semester - she did well. She joked that she has a better GPA than yours truly (a gross insult in this household) which is only true because of MIT ridiculousness. They use a 5.0 scale here. Bah.

In less school related news Ms. Duncan and yours truly moved into MIT student housing - a small one bedroom apartment midway up a very ugly building that I'm sure looked very cool in the 1970s - aka the decade of horrible industrial architecture that looked nice for 5 minutes. We just missed out on having an awesome view of the Charles River but the apartment is fine despite the tiny oven. We bought carpeting from a couple that was moving out - we had to cut it to fit our bedroom and living room - a note to future mover-inners - carpet is a nasty unmanageable beast and used carpet carries with it untold amounts of dust of previous owners that all comes out when you move it in. Ugh.

It was worth it.

A Week and a Half Break

Ms Duncan has just finished her summer break ... it was disconcertingly short - 1 1/2 weeks. We were quite busy - planning a certain ceremony and visiting friends with whom we bonded over various bouts of intestinal diseases during our Peace Corps service.

First we went to Vermont, stayed at a friend's family cabin in the woods, went swimming everyday in an amazingly beautiful lake with a perfect island right in the middle, toured the Cabot cheese factory, went to the Ben and Jerry's factory (no tour as they weren't actually making anything that day - and no free sample as far as I can tell), played cards and other games, cooked out (yours truly built a glorious cooking fire), played tennis, and generally had a fabulous time reconnecting with the people who were too lame to move to Boston when we left DC. There was much rejoicing.

As a couple friends were departing, we learned that they would be returning to the Northeast next weekend to see family in Maine - they invited us along so we ended up picking them up at the airport and driving through hellacious boston traffic along I-95 (easily the most gridlocked interstate top to bottom in the country) arriving at the family abode after midnight, waking up at 530 to drive another hour and a half north to the river, bundling up in wetsuits as it was 45 degrees outside, rafting down the river for 5 hours (an interlude that was broken up by lunch at the mosquito breeding grounds - seriously the most infested place I have ever seen), getting a busted lip from a bouncing oar (Ms. Duncan) and nearly falling out of the raft during class 5 rapids (yours truly - Ms. Duncan dropped her oar into the river to keep me from falling out), driving back to Bangor to attend a folk music festival, driving out to another cabin on a lake, jumping in said lake at midnight despite 45 degree temperatures, sleeping on tiny beds, jumping in the lake again, and heading back to boston.

When put that way it seems like quite a lot.