May 17, 2005
Running with scissors
Not many $20 million deals are sealed with rock, paper, scissors:
The Maspro Denkoh electronics corporation was selling its $20 million collection of Picassos and Van Goghs, but the director could not decide whether Sotheby’s or Christie’s should have the privilege of auctioning them.
So he announced that the deal would go to the winner of a single round of scissors, paper, stone - the children’s game that relies on quick fire hand gestures, where stone beats scissors, scissors beat paper, and paper beats stone.
Sotheby’s reluctantly accepted this as a 50/50 game of chance, but Christie’s asked the experts, Flora and Alice, 11-year-old daughters of the company’s director of Impressionist and modern art, and aficionados of the game. They explained their strategy:
1. Stone is the one that “feels” the strongest
2. Therefore a novice will expect their opponent to go for stone, and will go for paper to beat stone
3. Therefore go for scissors first
Sure enough, the novices at Sotheby’s went for paper, and Christie’s scissors got them an enormously lucrative cut.
Eclectic Econoclast John Palmer, who tipped me off to this story, thinks Christie’s just got lucky—at least, if his own childhood experiences are anything to go by:
In our own versions of the game, the novice strategy worked, more often than not, but for different reasons. We had to bring our fists down three times, and, on the third, keep the fist for a rock, hold our hand flat for paper, or extend two fingers for scissors. I soon learned that most people had an inertia or indecision or something that kept their hands in the shape of fists more often than not, so I won more often playing paper ... ... until they caught on.
Of course, the real pros consult the World RPS Society first.
Posted by Stephen at 7:05 PM in Business | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
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