I have described a model of learned interests that compete freely on the basis of the time frames over which their rewards are preferred. The most important implication of such a model is an incentive within each interest to learn strategic behaviors that forestall competing interests.

If a person is a population of these kinds of roommates, each clamoring to control the use of the room, how does she make decisions? An interest can't eliminate a competitor simply by providing more reward than the other does, either at one time or on the average, since the competitor might undo the first choice when it became dominant at a particular time in the future. On the other hand, to continue to exist, each interest has to be the highest bidder at some time or it will extinguish; to achieve this, each may have to constrain others and can't be too constrained by them. Just because an interest is dominant at one moment in time doesn't mean it will get its intended reward; while an interest is dominant it has to forestall conflicting interests long enough to realize the reward on which it's based.

HOW ONE INTEREST BINDS ANOTHER

For long-range interests, this usually means committing the person not to give in to short-range interests that might become dominant in the future.