One interesting thing about Amit Gupta's efforts to get people to register their bone marrow is he's actually helping other people much more than he's helping himself. The key point is that everyone who needs bone marrow is more likely to find a match because of the additional registrants.
Serious question: is there a game-theoretic name for this? It's kind of the opposite of tragedy of the commons or free-rider. Amit's actions actually seems structurally similar to contributing to open-source software: he's trying to solve his own problem, but at the same time helping thousands of other people.
In any case, you should sign up - wouldn't it be great to save someone's life in this way?
>Serious question: is there a game-theoretic name for this?
From the view of evolutionary game theory he might be called a "neutrally fit cooperator" or "nearly-neutrally fit cooperator".
In public goods games cooperators increase the amount of public goods available to everyone, but if there is some cost to producing the good they can be subject to invasion by defectors. Amit's campaign definitely benefits everyone in the community more or less equally, but the cost to him (determined by the additional opportunities he might have had to find a donor for himself through some other means) are presumably quite low to the point where we can consider them to be zero. Since both cooperators and defectors pay nothing but receive the same benefit, they are equally fit and no relative fraction of strategies employed by the population is preferred (although having more cooperators should contribute to a higher overall payoff).
The interesting little twist to the story, if we are thinking in terms of evolutionary game theory, is that players that reach a certain payoff (e.g., by getting there transplant), leave the game with some probability! This is the opposite of what usually happens in games in evolutionary biology, since higher absolute payoff is typically associated with larger population sizes.
Not a game-theoretic name, but in evolutionary theory such behaviours with similar outcomes are called "kin selection" or "group selection". IMHO, the former is more on the point.
Serious question: is there a game-theoretic name for this? It's kind of the opposite of tragedy of the commons or free-rider. Amit's actions actually seems structurally similar to contributing to open-source software: he's trying to solve his own problem, but at the same time helping thousands of other people.
In any case, you should sign up - wouldn't it be great to save someone's life in this way?