I used to think that there was a thing called “being a good partner” that was mostly like, doing things to make your partner better off.
Now I think something more like–there’s some amount of surplus created by a relationship, and creating surplus is good, but the allocation of that surplus is also important. And finding ways to capture more of the surplus, if you are getting relatively little of it, is an important relationship skill.
Can you expand with some examples please? I think this is potentially a really interesting point, but I do not fully understand it. =)
Say you have a relationship with someone where you play tennis with them every day. Each of you likes tennis and gets 5 utils from playing.
Say they really like going to the zoo, whereas you kinda dislike it. So going to the zoo together gives them 10 utils and gives you -4.
Naively, it seems like you should go to the zoo with them every day. After all, the net benefit is +6 utils. And even if you do this, the relationship is still net positive for you.
But this makes it so that while the relationship is really good for them, it’s barely good for you. Small perturbations in your utility function might make the relationship net negative for you, and then you’ll want to break up, which is bad for the other person and ultimately leaves a lot of surplus on the table.
So I think in this case it’s good to go to the zoo less often, and to think about other ways to transfer the surplus from them to you. Maybe having them bake you cookies costs them 1 util and gets you 1 util–even though it’s zero-sum, it might still be good to do.