Taking the awkwardness out of a Prenup - A Game Theoretic solution

Potential disadvantage: doing so signals that you're the sort of person who would benefit from such an agreement; i.e. someone who considers them-self vulnerable to goal distortion, and/or likely to be not trusted by their partner.

I think the legal details of this will need to be worked out but this is certainly very interesting! In theory, such a move ought to make you a more desirable wife and ought to prevent certain types of mistrust in the hypothetical husband. I doubt both of these would pan out in practice though, unless you are fairly certain to restrict your pool of potential husbands to the ultra-rationalists (who probably barely even exist in practice), or to guys who would a priori have preferred paternity testing, even before you bring it up to them.

I don't understand how that would make sense. What happens if you renege on such a contract, and how does it change things relative to the normal situation anyway? Even without any contract, if your husband wants to test the kid no matter what, he can dispute paternity until the test is done and the evidence is there. The details of course vary between jurisdictions, but I think this should be the case pretty much everywhere.

(Also, I'm not a lawyer, but I'm not sure if contracts of this sort would be enforceable in any case. From what I've red, prenups are ruled unconscionable fairly easily, and I can easily imagine a judge finding this sort of thing ethically fishy. But I'm just speculating here; if someone more knowledgeable is around, it would be interesting to hear from them.)

Probably not a good idea. It'll weird any potential husband out. See Vladimir's comment above.

Sigh ... Rationalists are still a long way away from winning ...

I like the idea.

Curious: how are prenup violations enforced? I assume with predefined monetary penalties settled at divorce.

Haha, when I googled LW for "goal distortion" I didn't expect the first hit to be Alicorn! :) I was thinking that Justin should write a post, but he's busy all the time. Problem is, he's thought about it more than anyone else, I think. Merrrrr.

Then, if two of your clients did business with each other, they would both have to pay the fee, right?

How about a startup that requires you to pay a similar fee for paying any contractually-obligated fee without first taking it to civil court for trial or settlement? Just sneak an advertisement in between the pages of the bar exams, and you're set.

Any thoughts on an optimal (game-theoretic) strategy in this universe?

The nonweird version of this is "my parents or business partners demand it."

So why are you thinking of marrying someone who has this sort of aversion to weirdness?

Agreed. I wish I could upvote this twice.

Agreed! In fact I was toying with the idea of emailing Robin this idea in a couple of lines as a potential idea for a future post at overcomingbias. I finally overcame inertia and went on to compose this :)

Yeah that's what I meant but wrote the sentence clumsily. Have corrected it now.

This is not legal advice, obviously, especially since you are not affiliated with Apple:

That kind of contract is specifically forbidden by most kinds of American contract law because of a lingering free labor ideology. The concern is that if Apple changed its mind about whether it wanted to 'work for' the third-party commitment company, it might not have 10 billion dollars, and so it would face a choice between work or bankruptcy; that kind of choice can be too close to indentured servitude, and indentured servitude is un-American. The logic gets pretty ridiculous when the party in question is a huge corporation that doesn't have to sign a contract like that if it doesn't want to, but "deterring rival tablet manufacturers" isn't necessarily a good thing either -- we want some competition in the consumer technology marketplace.

Similarly with potential wives. They could sign contracts that agree they will never sign prenups--another hawk/dove equilibrium.

I'm baffled by this logic. If the two people want to be together, but have incompatible contracts, then they still get to be together. They just won't marry. This is still a total win for the pro-prenup-contractor, who doesn't risk losing any money. But it's a loss for the anti-prenup contractor, since they don't get to gain any money.

In contrast, the person without an anti-prenup contract gets to be married, but can't get their hands on the pro-prenup contractor's money.

Which of these two sounds more socially acceptable? And which is more likely to seem desirable to the type of person the pro-prenup contractor would prefer to marry in the first place?

(1) and (2) seem pretty easy.

If there is a contradiction in pre-pre nups, either one party reneges on the contract and pays the stiff price or the marriage doesn't take place. When you opt for such a pre-pre-nup you are presumably willing to eliminate the pool of potential partners who are fundamentally opposed to the terms of your pre-pre-nup. Think of this as ideally no different from a situation when community property and other similar laws were abolished. In such a situation, you are free to turn down suitors who want pre-nups that enforce community property laws, or have pre-pre-nups which bind them to the same.

Of course, I don't know enough of the issue of "inalienable rights" and what kind of 

contracts are made illegal by law. With my limited knowledge it seems that it should be possible to make contracts that achieve these, possibly by some circuitous means. Of course I am no lawyer and don't know the fine points.

You are right about competition serving quite a useful purpose in the real world. However the real world is not like financial markets where you have liquidity by the milli second with regard to competing offers. If competition did a great job of providing an alternative in real time, they would be no need to do the following in pretty much any negotiation

1. Pretend that you have lots of time and are in no hurry to close this deal with the other party or anyone else.
2. Pretend that you looked up and found/know of much better deals elsewhere that what the other party is offering. Alternatively claim that the competing deals you are getting are much better than they truly are.

3. Pretend that your "last price" is very different from your true last price.

   If competition were doing an amazing job, there would be no reason to do 1-3 above.

You say above "you can just get a competing dealer to make an offer which becomes the upper bound". If you are a person who is putting time to productive use, it would not be unreasonable to value your hour at well over $50. The question is therefore whether you can find competing offers without spending 10-20 hours which would pretty much erode your whole margin of savings.

Schelling's introduction mentions that his work sits in a space between pure theoretical game theory and purely pragmatic or psychological bargaining. A pre-commitment is part of a bargaining process, so if you can pre-commit before the one you're bargaining with (not necessarily chronologically) you win. If you both pre-commit simultaneously, you both lose.

The car example has the two actors signing contracts with opposing goals.

I can't see why someone would set up beforehand a contract that prevented them from signing a prenup. The reluctance to prenuptial arrangements only appears after you've met "the one", and all that the anti-prenup actor is concerned with is the motivation of the pro-prenup actor, and signing a counter-contract won't allay that.

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My understanding is that one of a handful of editors has to manually promote your post, which they tend to do if (a) they wrote the post, (b) the post gets a high (about 20+) score, or (c) it's about a Less Wrong meetup.

Please, NO!... the break is already there, at the bottom of the screen. To get past it, push the page down key, or scroll using whatever method your browser allows.

People don't feel "I love him/her, therefore I must absolutely trust him/her". They feel "I absolutely trust him/her, that means I love him/her".

Then the statement of absolute trust is accounted for by the significant rate of mistakes people make.

Alternatively, you can make that statement as part of a strategy to maximize your expected return on a marriage - if the increase in marriage quality from placing absolute trust in your spouse is greater than the expected cost of being disadvantaged in the divorce negotiaions (if your spouse turns out to be untrustworthy), then you might rationally do it anyways.

Even strongly committed muggles put a lot of stock in the customary romantic pieties. "If you think I'm the one, why would you want to sign a prenup?"