The Non-credible Threat

The non-credible threat is a strategy that youngsters learn very early in life and many hone the skill into true art. They learn that they can get their way on occasion if they make a threat to do something that would be essentially self-destructive. An example might be a child who threatens to hold his breath until he passes out unless the parent gives him what he wants. He probably wouldn’t go through with it, but one never knows. That’s why it is effective.

Parents use it on children as well. The parent might threaten, “If you don’t behave right now, we’ll just go right straight home.” If you are visiting Disneyland, this might not be completely believable, but maybe the child doesn’t really want to push his luck.

Indian parents are masters in the art. If they don’t like your new girlfriend and perhaps soon-to-be wife, they might threaten to disown you and never allow you to step foot in the house again. See Saket’s post to get a taste of this.

In game theory, the non-credible threat can be modeled as a simple two-stage game. First player two threatens. Then player 1 plays either “capitulate” or “non-capitulate”. If player 1 plays “non-capitulate”, then player 2 plays either “accept” or “reject”. Here are the possible payoffs for each player (player 1, player 2):

1. (c): ( 1 , 2 )


2. (n, a): ( 2, 1 )


3. (n, r): ( -10, -10)

If they play the “non-credible threat” game only once, it is clearly irrational for player 2 to actually carry out the threat and reject the offer player 1 makes. But here is where it gets interesting: suppose everyone knows that player 2 is a hothead and not at all likely to use reason. Then they may believe that he/she will actually play “reject” and therefore decide it is best to capitulate. The point is that “irrationality” is rational if one plays the game often enough.

In the current controversy over IIPM vs. bloggers, Gaurav Sabnis resigned from IBM because he believed that IIPM students might actually carry out an non-credible threat to burn laptops in front of IBM. Was this a credible or a non-credible treat? Gaurav thought it was credible. But one wonders if IIPM students would really burn their nice new laptops.

Indians might be more inclined to issue and to capitulate to non-credible threats. Strikes (bundhs) are more common and more violent in India than in most western nations. Parents do issue the threat of disowning their children if they don’t marry a suitable boy or girl and some really do carry out this threat.

The point I want to make is that the person making the non-credible threat is really just a bully. He or she is trying to influence your life in a way that is unacceptable. And it is easy enough for people to kill off this nasty practice: throw the non-credible threat right back at the person making the threat. You can say: “okay, fine, I want to see the burnt laptops.” Or you can say, “Mom, if you don’t like my wife, I will not step foot in your house and you will never know your grandchildren.” We can stop the non-credible threats by simply insisting on resisting them. This is the point about non-credible threats, they often hurt the person doing the threatening. If he or she knew that no one would ever capitulate, they would never make the threats in the first place.

It isn’t surprising that Gaurav refused to delete his blog entries because he is a great lover of freedom and liberty (a libertarian) and he would not want to capitulate to the non-credible threat. But he did resign which meant the bullies didn’t have to actually burn any laptops. Too bad. If I were in that situation, I would have dearly wanted to see some burnt laptops. I would have wanted to see the bullies look stupid…just to teach them a lesson.