Make Me Happy Contest Results

Hi Everyone,

Welcome to the Make Me Happy Contest results post. This is the fourth economics contest for 2023. This post contains a video of an Excel Model. This Excel Model determines the winner of the contest by generating utility values for activities and the overall utility for characters selected by the participants.

Winner determined in this video

What is the Make Me Happy Contest?

The Make Me Happy Contest focuses on maximising the utility of different characters who have different preferences. Participants can choose between 5 different characters. Participants are required to maximise the utility of their character using 168 hours in a week. This involves earning sufficient money to pay for basic needs and to pay for activities that yield their character utility. Characters can only earn money from working. Working itself yields at least some utility but it is generally lower than most other activities. Characters do not start the week with any money and any remaining money yields no utility. To win the contest, the participant must produce the highest utility for his or her character while not exceeding the character’s earned income for that week.

Responses to the contest are made in the comments section of the contest post. The account with the winning entry will receive 30 Hive Power.

The format of the required entry is explained in detail in the contest itself.

For a more detailed explanation, you can access the contest post using the following link.

Results of the Make Me Happy Contest

Tables 1 and 2 contains the allocation of time for each activity by all participants for this contest.

Table 1: Allocation of time for each activity (Participants 1 to 5)

Table 2: Allocation of time for each activity (Participants 6 to 11)

Table 3 contains the utility for each activity for all 5 characters.

Table 3: Utility of Activities for each Character

Table 4 contains the utility generated by each participant’s character

Table 4: Utility generated by each participant's characters

This contest was quite close. @fatherfaith won by just 146 Utils after allocating time for his character Isaac. @fatherfaith spread time over a few different activities but mostly focused on camping, which is Isaac’s favourite activity. Congratulations @fatherfaith, you win 30 Hive Power.

Contest Tips and Analysis

This contest involved a careful balancing act between earning income, choosing high utility activities, and low cost activities. Different characters required different approaches. For example, Gemima obtains utility from many different activities (e.g. watching TV, social media, gardening, camping, painting, and even working). Therefore, spreading time more evenly across these many activities is likely to produce higher utility for her as well as avoids diminishing utility from dedicating too much time to one activity. Working extra hours is also not a problem as she enjoys her work so much and the value of her time spent working does not diminish over time.

For a character like Randall, time would be better off concentrated on just one activity such as just social media. He also enjoys painting but his enjoyment diminishes relatively quickly compared with other activities. He enjoys eating out but it is expensive and he may lack the budget to do so too often considering that he does not enjoy his work and is also paid very little.

A character like Isaac would be fairly easy to work with because he earns a good wage and enjoys his work with minimal diminishing marginal utility. He also has a relatively low basic expenditure. Most of Isaac’s favourite activities are low cost. For this character, participants should focus on allocating time to activities such as reading a book and camping as they provide high utility and this does not diminish by much over time.

Examples of allocations of time for Randall, Gemima, and Isaac

Most of the participants understood the concepts of maximising utility by focusing on the activities that provided the highest chances of obtaining high utility. You all deserve a round of applause.

More posts

If you want to read any of my other posts, you can click on the links below. These links will lead you to posts containing my collection of works. These 'Collection of Works' posts have been updated to contain links to the Hive versions of my posts.

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