So there you are, on a long drive to somewhere new when suddenly, you realize that you’re gas tank is getting closer and closer to empty. You know that you need to fill up soon, but you want to make sure you don’t get ripped off, so what do you do? Well, according to the blogger over at Mind Your Decisions, there is a way! He simply suggests that you consider finding the cheapest gas much as you would consider finding the perfect mate. In an earlier post he details the best way to find “true love.”

First he points out that “true love” is relative and that the only way to place a value on your relationship with someone is to compare it to a previous one. Keeping this in mind, one formulates a plan. Say for example at max you want to date 3 people in your life. That means for each person you date you have a 1/3 chance of them being the “correct person.” However, if you adopt the strategy that you get to know but always end it with the first person and then settle down with the next person who is better than the first person, you increase your chance of “winning” to 50%. The idea is that the only two ways you can lose is if you date the best person out of the three first, or if you date the worst person first and date the second best person after them. In order to figure out how many people you need to pass by in order to make this strategy most effective involves how many total people you want to date. Applying this basic concept to finding a gas station means that your best response to the first gas station you see is to keep driving along and then pick the next gas station that has the best price. This theory is made stronger because gas stations tend to cluster together due to the concepts of social optimum not always being the Nash equilibrium. If gas stations are equally spread out in relation to consumers, it is the social optimum as ever gas station is equidistant from every consumer, however if one gas station moves they will dominate more of the market by placing themselves closer to some of the other gas station’s customers but still the nearest to their old customers. Since Nash equilibrium means that there’s no incentive for either player to deviate from the current strategy the social equilibrium doesn’t match the Nash equilibrium.