"Wizards usually have mechanical timepieces because you want to know exactly how long until your spell runs out. Other people just go off the sun, mostly."

Someone produces a pocketwatch to show Keltham.

"Yeaaahhhh I kind of need one of those, will talk to requisitions about it I guess."

"Anyways.  The next step in the economics game would be one I don't see a simple way to play here; it involves a puzzle station that takes two players cooperating to win, and the two sides of the game vary independently in how much effort it takes to control that side of it.  Once the puzzle is sufficiently solved, one player locks in a split from 0 to 12, the other player has to decide whether to accept that split, and the game station spits out jellychips if they do."

"The idea being, this is modeling two people working on a task together, only they're not putting in the same amount of effort.  It's not easy to see from inspection exactly how much work the other player is doing.  And then one of the players has to decide how to split the rewards, afterwards, and the other player has to decide whether to accept that, or if they both get nothing."

"What would you do, in that situation?  What do you think we did in dath ilan, as kids?"

"...I don't see how that game is any different than this one? Unless you mean there's not the reputational element."

"You don't have an intuition that, in a game like that, the person who worked harder should get more jellychips?"

Students glance at each other confusedly. 

Carissa has literally no idea how Taldane students would answer that question so they'll just have to answer as themselves. "I mean, if it's a really atrocious amount of work and they don't do what they're supposed to in school just because they want to grow stronger, maybe they'll only be willing to do it if they're promised a certain number of jellychips in return?"

"...do you have an intuition that in real life, if you cast a spell that was really difficult and exhausting to set up that morning, you'd want to charge more gold pieces for doing that."

"...I mean, I'm going to charge as much as I can for any spell, right? If a spell is laborious, then probably it's also laborious for other wizards, so I can expect that fewer of them prepared it and that I can get away with higher prices, but if I try that and I'm wrong then I'll go on charging whatever price it sells at, or I'll stop doing it if it's not worth it at the price people want to pay me for it."

Why are they so inconsistently economics?!?

"Suppose you're living in a multifamily home and there's this one big chore that nobody particularly wants to do, so everybody writes down their price for doing the chore, and everyone else pays whoever wrote down the lowest price to do it.  There's no market in doing the chore, it's a one-time thing that's never going to happen again.  You'd still write down a higher price for a chore you expected to need to spend more effort doing."

For unclear reasons this example fails to land.

"...suppose there's one job that's really easy and pays 1000 gold pieces a year, and there's one job that's really difficult and exhausting and pays 1003 gold pieces per year.  You'd probably take the first job, even though the market rate for it is lower, because the second job isn't worth enough more to make up for the additional effort you have to put in."

Yep, okay, they agree with that!

"If you've got two wizards fighting two monsters to get to a pile of gold coins they're guarding," Keltham's rapid skimming has picked up that this is a thing, though why is a much deeper and darker and more confusing question, "and one monster turns out to be a much tougher fight than the other, would the wizard who fought the tougher monster expect more than exactly half of the gold coins?"

".....depends on the contract they had going in?"

"Okay, and if a contract didn't just say to divide the coins evenly, and the two wizards otherwise had equal job experience, what would the contract say?"

Most of these students have not actually met any adventurers. 

"Usually it'd say an even split, or an even split with the option to take it to arbitration if one party feels the other was shirking, or an uneven split because one put up the money for the expedition or had the tip on the password to the door or had the Teleport location or something."

"So, the solution that dath ilani children immediately invent, is both kids say on a scale from 0 to 12 how hard they thought they had to work, and then the jellychips get divided in proportion to that.  I mean, that wouldn't reliably work at higher stakes except between lovers or cofounders, and if you're doing something with a hundred people you need a more objective and third-party way to measure efforts, but - if two people were just tidying a friend's house for money, or some such - saying intuitively how much effort you put in and dividing the payment accordingly would be very ordinary?  Do you have anything like that anywhere?"

Obviously everyone would lie, to themselves if necessary, so it's an incredibly stupid system? She doesn't say that.

"You don't want to reward effort," says Meritxell, "you want to reward results. If two people cleaned the same amount and one found it easy and one found it hard you don't want to give the one who found it hard compensation for their finding it hard! You might compensate them for the work but not for the effortfulness, unless you're their teacher or something and trying to build their character for some reason."

"That works great and we'd do that as a matter of course, any time we had a reliable way of measuring how much work got done of how much intrinsic difficulty!  When you're tidying a house, you can't measure area tidied to determine work done, it takes more effort to tidy a kitchen than a bedroom, and not in any standard way!  If two people are going in without any prior reason to believe one of them is more efficient than the other, how hard they worked is an obvious if imperfect proxy for how difficult the job actually was..."

"I keep thinking that maybe the answer is that Golarion is a lower-trust society than dath ilan, and people are too scared the other person will lie about how hard the job was, or how good they are at it - which, I mean, you'd almost have to be lower-trust, given everything, but - that doesn't answer why lovers or cofounders or even just very good friends would never make an arrangement like that?"

"I mean," says Gregoria, "they might? But you're not supposed to have lovers or cofounders in school, and you don't really have side jobs, so we wouldn't know, even if that's how some people do things privately."

"...right.  Well, dath ilani kids invent the 0-12 scale and divide rewards proportionally to how hard they thought they worked, and... that succeeds for them, their spoken intuitive estimates are usually pretty close to the actual difficulty calibrations on the machines.  You have to hand out concealed cards telling some of the kids to be dishonest in their work estimates, if you want to break that up."

"It sounds like Cheliax might need to do other training differently, earlier in the sequence than this, if they want to get that same result with kids."

"I think so."

Keltham describes the sad situation which eventuates when you do hand out dishonesty cards to kids.  They work hard, propose splits that they guess are fair, not being able to trust the other person, and then sometimes those splits get rejected.  The kids get angry!  There is shouting!  They get sent home for the day without having a solution shown to them, because it's good for them to sometimes dwell with problems that don't get solved immediately.

(He doesn't tell them about younger-Keltham's emotional difficulties with being asked to act out a dishonesty card; he has a sense that Chelaxians would have trouble relating, for some reason.  Maybe they'd say that even at age seven you should be able to understand that the game isn't real and just do what the card says?)

If Keltham has understood correctly, Cheliax considers the obvious game solution to be even splits of jellychips, irrespective of work difficulty; which is repeatedly randomly unfair, and hence asymptotically fair.  Going into any one game, you are equally likely to get faced with a harder or an easier task for your fixed payment, and if you repeat that often enough, the expected unfairness as a fraction of all payments will drop as the square root of the number of repetitions.  It's not actually too bad, as solutions go.

Still, if Cheliax already has a better solution to the dath ilani game, or to the real-world situation that it stands for, Keltham stands ready to hear it?