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Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2015 17:43:07 +0100
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Subject: The Game Theory of Scalar Type Hint Voting
From: kontakt@beberlei.de (Benjamin Eberlei)

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Hello,

with two competing RFCs (has this ever happend before?) we are in an
interesting spot now, game theoretically. Just letting both RFC authors
open and close the votes will bias the votes just by nature of who starts
first.

My (potentially very wrong) armchair analysis of the timeline is (my game
theory university knowledge is very dusty):

We have 3 types of players, 1 RFC a author, 1 RFC b author, $n voters,
roughly (subjective opinion) split between STH v0.5, coercive STH and no
type hinting (40/40/20).

The first vote to end, will get 40% of votes. If we assume that there are
STH proponents that don't care about the implementation and only want the
feature, then they will start to switch their vote on the second RFC now,
pushing it over 66% like Andrea's RFC managed.

The likelihood of the second RFC winning, REGARDLESS which one that is, is
much higher. So both RFC authors have no incentive to start their vote
first, delaying the vote.

One solution could be both votes should be parallel. In this case the
likelihood of both failing is very high, because you cannot vote with a
preference here, you will vote yes for one and no for the other. In either
case, if both votes end at exactly the same time, I think this could get
some ebay sniping vote sswitch behavior.

So the best/fairest option might probably, vote for both combined in a
single vote. This makes the likelihood of acceptance very high, however it
will pick one or the other by 50%+1, which might be against the voting RFC.

In any case, funny problem :-)

greetings
Benjamin

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