The large pig does not have a dominant strategy.
The large pig does not have a dominant strategy. It prefers to wait at the dis- penser if the small pig is going to press the lever, but it prefers to press the lever if the small pig is going to wait at the dispenser. If the large pig believes that the small pig is rational (now, that most definitely sounds odd!), then the large pig knows that the small pig will wait at the dispenser. That the small pig won’t get enough food to make it worth its while to press the lever serves to make it credible that it won’t press the lever. The large pig then has no choice but to press the lever, even though this means that the small pig has the advantage of being at the food first. Of course, once the large pig gets there, it can be assured of getting enough food to justify having pressed the lever. Thus, if pigs are ra- tional and each pig believes that the other pig is rational, then the solution is for the large pig to press the lever and the small pig to wait at the dispenser.
Is saying “if pigs are rational” like saying “if pigs could fly”? It actually is per- fectly reasonable to assume that pigs are rational, since this just means that pigs act in their own best interests; don’t all species? More problematic is assuming that pigs believe that other pigs are rational; that’s dicey. But before you dismiss this so- lution, let’s see if it works by comparing the solution with how pigs actually behave.
The experiment was conducted in a cage measuring about 2.8 meters by 1.8 meters.3 To ensure a strong desire to eat, the pigs were not fed for 24 hours. Each pig was initially put in a cage by itself in order for it to learn that press- ing the lever resulted in food being dispensed. Rather than focus on size as the determining factor, the experimenters determined dominance by putting the two pigs together in a room with a bowl of food. A pig was classified as dom- inant if it spent a higher fraction of the time feeding singly from the bowl.
The results are shown in FIGURE 3.15. On the vertical axis is the number of times the lever was pressed per 15 minutes. On the horizontal axis is the trial