Econoblogger ShadowBanker bring together economic analysis and the world of comics characters, looking at the economic viability and rational behind inter-villain co-operation in Batman stories such as The Long Halloween:
“if the Joker cooperates with one other villain (say Two-Face) and together they manage to kill Batman, then the utility for each would be 5. In effect, this means that the villains “split” the utility of 10…”
(Batman and the Joker enjoy a romantic night flight in The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale, (c) DC)
“Now, let’s assign the probabilities. I’m going to assume that each Batman rogue has a 2% chance of killing Batman alone (and this is being very, very generous and neglecting the individual skills of each rogue for simplicity). You would then think that adding villains to the scheme would increase the probability of killing Batman by 2% with each new rogue. Except, this ignores the economics law of diminishing returns, which states that as you increase the factors of production, the marginal benefit of those factors decreases. Usually, this applies to outcomes which are continuous (such as production of goods) rather than binary (to kill or not to kill Batman), but we can apply diminishing returns in this case to the probabilities. The theory is that as you add villains, working together will prove more difficult and planning more arduous. Therefore, the probability of getting Batman will increase, but by a marginally smaller amount with each villain added.”
I’m more word oriented than figures and economics oriented so I’m not sure I understand all of it, but it all sounds jolly impressive. (via Boing Boing)
Fri, Jun 12, 2009
Comics and cartoons