Scene 2 - Another usual evening on the baddy court. Venue - Badminton Court, Time - 6 p.m. (Continuation)

In the last blog, I had mentioned that how one day the expectation hypothesis that I had created in the badminton court got questioned. The next set of question which came on mind was with what expectation hypothesis between the caller and the badminton player a truthful information is revealed. The answer was quite simple and was buried in the mystery that all social scientists, economists try to unravel with the wide world of economics of information. Probably, when the caller has already been informed by the player about his baddy playing routine practice, its best for the baddy player to reveal the truthful information so that the trust that has been created by truthful revelation of information in past experiences persists. A truthful information creates trust and that trust create future expectations between both the caller and baddy player to maintain the trust levels at each time period by revealing truthful information. So its the incentive of the baddy player to reveal the truthful information to consolidate the expectation that has been created between the player and the caller. But the real question is will such an incentive to reveal truthful information exist for the baddy player under all circumstances.

Here the answer is really not so simple. In this regard I am really grateful to my very close friend Sambuddha Mitra Mustafi (who works for BBC) who raised a very interesting question yesterday on facebook to the earlier blog of badminton. His view point was under various circumstances based on at what state the game is the chances of telling a lie can go up or down. So, Mustafi's view point was that - "if a baddy player is on matchpoint or close to winning he/she will lie at home to stay back in the baddy court" and "if the baddy player is in a worse condition he/she could find an excuse to escape by means of the call from home". Once this view point came yesterday, I kept on thinking till quite late night and a very interesting discourse to the expectation hypothesis (developing betweeen callers, receivers) that I was trying to set up came up.

The expectation hypothesis (which is more generic in nature with an analogy to general equilibrium models we create through some kind of CGE structures) that I was trying to set up was totally based on the level, nature and degree of exchange of information between the caller (from home) and the receivers (in the baddy court). Based on that fact, I was trying to establish a generic theory of trust, information and expectation hypothesis between two individuals under various conditions of their relationship status and information disclosure levels between them. But, I had totally missed, neglected out certain scenarios (as we call them in economic or policy modelling) that could outweigh this generic theory by creating different incentives for a baddy player to tell a lie or a truth based on the state of the baddy and the inherent expectations of the baddy player about winning and loosing a game.

So this raises the scope for another set of thinking where I would now try and test this generic theory of trust, information and truth/lie telling by creating more scenarios of incentives for the baddy player. This creates more incentives for me to have some sleepless nights, till I can find out some answers through sample testing on these lines in Scene 3 of the next blogs to come.

Anando