Institute For The Future

"Cooperation, competition, and the Tour de France"

I've been watching the Tour de France the last couple weeks, waiting to see if Lance Armstrong would end his career with a seventh win. (I hope he does, but I also hope he has to fight Rasmussen for it. The Tour would be so much more interesting if the outcome were not a foregone conclusion.)

I never used to be that interested in the Tour de France, but I became fascinated with it after getting involved in the future of cooperation project, and realized that it exemplified the complex relationship between cooperation and competition.

You might think that cycling would just be every man for himself, but it's not. There's a lot of strategy that's involved, and also some cultural norms about what you're obliged to do as part of a breakaway or leading team. (It's bad form, for example, to just stay in someone's slipstream; you're supposed to take a turn leading.) There are also rules about not taking advantage of people's misfortunes, though that's a little trickier. A couple years ago, Lance Armstrong stopped when his biggest competitor, German racer Jan Ullrich, ran off the road.

Part of this is old-fashioned gentlemanly conduct, but it's also a recognition that a bicycle race is a small world, and while everyone wants to win, no one can afford alienate themselves from the group. You have to compete to win. But you have cooperate to finish-- or to be in a position to compete, and have a chance to win. (Though one doesn't want to make too much of such informal arrangements, or moral economies, to give them a less conspiratorial air. As Slate diarist Ian Austen reported a while ago, some veterans feel that "all the old traditions" that used to help weaker riders just make it through the whole Tour "are dying.")

A friend pointed out this article by David Ronfeldt, "Social Science at 190 MPH on Nascar's Biggest Speedways." Here's the abstract:

 

In aerodynamically intense stock-car races like the Daytona 500, the drivers form into multi-car draft lines to gain extra speed. A driver who does not enter a draft line (slipstream) will lose. Once in a line, a driver must attract a drafting partner in order to break out and try to get further ahead. Thus the effort to win leads to ever-shifting patterns of cooperation and competition among rivals.

This provides a curious laboratory for several social science theories: (1) complexity theory, since the racers self-organize into structures that oscillate between order and chaos; (2) social network analysis, since draft lines are line networks whose organization depends on a driver's social capital as well as his human capital; and (3) game theory, since racers face a "prisoner's dilemma" in seeking drafting partners who will not defect and leave them stranded. Perhaps draft lines and related "bump and run" tactics amount to a little-recognized dynamic of everyday life, including in structures evolving on the Internet.

 

The Tour is a great example of an institution in which you see combinations of flocking behavior, smart mob behavior (the teams all have little radios, and can communicate with their coaches to plan strategy on the road), and an interesting tension between cooperation and competition. You have to cooperate to survive: you have to compete successfully to win.

Likewise, my other great guilty pleasure, the reality TV game show "The Amazing Race," is a reality-show experiment in cooperative behavior in a competitive context.

For those who haven't watched "The Amazing Race," a bit of background. The race began with twelve teams, each with two people. It's an around-the-world race with thirteen stage. Each stage takes about a day, and contains a mix of travel (flying or driving, or both) and tasks (which are real dog's breakfast). The last team to complete the stage gets eliminated.

What's interesting about the game is that it's a paradigmatic example of a paradoxical but common phenomenon: you have to cooperate with other teams to survive, but you have to compete with them to win. The winners of the race will get a million dollars, which is a great incentive to compete; but in the early stages, there's a lot of explicit cooperation. Why?

First, each stage has a rhythm that ends up equalizing the teams: the stages usually begin late at night, and teams almost always reach their first destination several hours before they can actually perform the task that will let them move on. This levels the playing field: yesterday's tortises catch up to the hares. Since teams don't accumulate time advantages over the course of the race (as you do in the Tour de France), and since the stages are designed with these equalizers, in any stage there's little opportunity for teams to break away from the pack. In fact, given the structure and rhythm of the game, it's not so important to be first, but it is absolutely critical that you NOT be last.

Since no one can get too far ahead, and since this stage's first-mover advantage will get eliminated tomorrow, there's less incentive to withhold information from people who have caught up with you; you're not too likely to shake them, nor do you necessarily need to.

Second, most players figure out pretty quickly that your team may need help one day, so it's in your interest to help others, and to not be too pushy or mean. It's hard to keep other teams from seeing you get on a particular train, buy a ticket from United instead of Quantas, or whatever; so you might as well be nice about it. Jumping the cue for a flight that won't leave for four hours is pretty dumb: it buys you little, but costs you a lot of social capital. A team that refuses to share or play nicely can get shunned quickly, with potentially bad results.

Now, here's where it gets interesting. There's a tension built into this structure: at what point do you stop cooperating with other teams, and start competing with them? After all, there can only be one winner.

Further, as the number of surviving teams dwindles, the odds of you being cut out of the herd increase, which is a good incentive to look out for yourself. A great deal of the drama of "The Amazing Race" comes when teams start to make this calculation. This cooperation-within-competition tension turns out to be a popular one with reality TV shows these days. "Survivor" operates on a similar model, with people cooperating on tasks, then voting each other off the island.

An even better example is the game show "The Weakest Link." There, players take turns answering questions; the more questions they get right in a round, the bigger that round's pot gets; but if one player gets a question wrong, the pot empties. No one owns the pot yet, but everyone wants it to be as full as possible. So each player has an incentive to get rid of people who can't answer questions. But each player also has an incentive to get rid of people who know more than they do. Thus the tension: you have to cooperate to generate a large pot; you want smart players to make a lot of money; but the players who can best help you reach your goal are also your most dangerous competitors.

At a certain point, the game tips, and you have to shift your attention away from eliminating the weak, to killing off the strong. Put another way, you have to choose between two forms of greed: Do you cooperate with your competitors, increasing both risk for yourself and the reward? Or do you try to target your competitors, thus lowering your risk, but also lower your reward?

I suspect you could probably explain a lot of herd animal behavior in similar terms: there's broad cooperation in seaching for food, avoiding predators, etc., even though there's competition for mates and status. David Sloan Wilson identified a similar paradox when he said, "The fundamental problem of social life is that selfishness beats altruism within a group. But altruistic groups trump selfish groups."

We often think of cooperation and competition as polar opposites, but in the modern world I suspect that's rarely the case: the norm now is something far more complex. A few years ago, high-tech pundits talked about "coopetition" as a new business model: but this notion of cooperation among competitors strikes me as highly tactical, and not terribly profound. (I could be wrong, of course.) Games like cycling, car racing, and reality TV point to something more basic: under many circumstance, you have to cooperate to compete.

One doesn't want to speak too loudly about the benefits of reality TV, but perhaps they'll help some people learn that pure competition isn't the only model for game playing, or real life.