Controlling a Wild Daughter

Parents, as well as teachers, often try to control their children’s behavior with threats. Imagine that two parents fear their wild teenage daughter will become pregnant. First, they try reason and urge her to be more careful. But when reason fails, the parents resort to threatening to disown their daughter and kick her out of the house if she becomes pregnant. Should the daughter believe her parents’ threat? Not if she knows that her parents love her.

If the daughter trusts in her parents’ love, then she will believe that the threat was made to improve her welfare. If the daughter became pregnant, she would need her parents more than ever. The daughter should thus realize that her caring parents would devote even more resources to her if she got pregnant. An intelligent but still wild daughter should ignore her parents’ threat as lacking credibility. Sure, loving parents might threaten their daughter to dissuade her from having sex. If she gets pregnant, however, it would not be in the interest of caring parents to actually carry out the threat. The manifest love of the parents weakens their negotiating strength. Interestingly, if the daughter suspected that her parents didn’t love her, then she might believe their threat, and all three of them would be better off.

Circumstances in life and business often arise where you would gain from making a believable threat. Unfortunately, game theory shows that many threats can and should be ignored, since a man is never as good as his word in game theory land. Game theory, fortunately, provides many means of making credible threats.