Minds Boost Schedule: An Idea for Optimization
Schedules and their Importance
In economics, a schedule is a list of the incremental changes you see in relation to the incremental increases in some fundamental value--such as the quantity of items that a factory produces.
A cost schedule, for instance, may show "average cost per unit produced" to be falling at the beginning of production, only to eventually rise as a factory begins to stretch its own capacity.
In a car factory, the average cost per unit--when producing the very first car--is high, because all of the business costs apply to this one unit of output. Average cost per unit drops almost by half then, simply by producing a second car.
At some point of increasing production, however, average cost per unit will start to rise, making it unprofitable (for this one factory) to continue to expand production. Imagine a factory producing so much that its workers are getting in the way of each other!
Economics is a science which can tell you how you can--in the real world--optimize things.
The Minds Boost Schedule
The Minds boost schedule is currently something like this illustration:
As you can see, as the number of Minds Tokens paid increases by 1, the number of views received increases by 1000. When going from 1 token to 2 tokens, you double the views you receive. When going from 2 tokens to 4 tokens, you double the views again.
Economists call it 'constant returns to scale' and it usually only occurs in a small scope, such as during a specific 5-10% of all possible levels for things--such as "quantity produced."
There may be constant returns for a power company when ramping up electric power output from 40% of capacity to 50% of capacity (10% of the range), for instance, but then constant returns "vanish" after that.
In real life, companies would be ecstatic if they were told that incremental growth in profits would not ever diminish with each and every new increase in inputs to production (the more you spend, the more you make ... guaranteed)!
But reality is not like that. You do not consistently get just as much more profit with each new increase in input--so should the Minds Boost Schedule consistently give us just as much more views for each new increase in Minds Tokens?
Shouldn't it concern us, at least a little, that it would not work if applied in the real world? What if it turns out that it is, at least in part, responsible for Boost backlogs (long waits for our Boosts to begin to accrue views)?
Diminishing Marginal Utility or Value
In the real world, there is something called diminishing marginal utility, and it pertains to the fact that the very first identical unit of an item which you receive is valued the most, and each additional unit you receive (an additional house, an additional car, an additional dollar, etc.)--if it is even just roughly identical to the first one--will be valued less than those before.
If you have no car, for instance, you'll be extremely happy to gain one car--as it'll allow you to drive to places. If you already have one car--and can already drive to places--a second car won't be valued as much as the first one was. Starting off with two cars, and then moving to three of them, you will gain even less extra value (from the third car added to the first two).
Kahneman and Tversky, who developed Prospect Theory in behavioral economics, researched this diminishing rate at which utility or value drops for us, and they discovered that, when assessing gains (rather than losses), the median "value function" for real human beings is represented by the additional amount raised to the power .88.
In laymen terms, you can think of how happy you'd be with double the stuff. If you go from having no house--where you sleep out in the cold--to having one house, you'll become much more happy. However, if you already have a house, and then you gain another one--will you be twice as happy as the first one made you?
The short answer is: No. You will not be twice as happy, because there is a diminishing marginal utility for you to have that second house (from a baseline condition of already having one).
But you will gain approximately 84% of what you gained from the first house, and this is because the new number of units of houses, compared to your situation before, is "two"--and two, raised to the power of .88, is equal to 1.84. You will have the gain from the first house (1.00) plus the gain from the second house (0.84).
Here is a proposed Boost Schedule, which could be tried out for a while (if there is interest):
Note how I put an example (in cell C2) of the value function which Tversky and Kahneman discovered in research.
The differences in new views awarded from each new input of an additional Minds Token may seem too small to have the power to solve things: such as a Boost backlog.
However, even small differences can add up to big ones, in a marketplace involving hundreds or thousands of participants having thousands or millions of interactions with each other each year.
Reference
Tversky, Amos and Kahneman, Daniel (1992): “Advances in Prospect Theory: Cumulative Representation of Uncertainty,” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 5, 297-323. Available: http://psych.fullerton.edu/mBIRNBAUM/psych466/articles/Tversky_Kahneman_JRU_92.pdf