Deciding on things is hard. Deciding on things together is harder.
Divide house cleaning chores with your roommates.Everyone can avoid the chores they hate.
Make group decisions on movies and food with your team.A fair choice each time.
Negotiate prices for artistic commisions.Everyone submits their prices in secret. No misunderstandings, no overthinking.
Compromise as a household or with close friends, so that all get what they want.Keep track on promises and "i owe you one"s.
Overly complex managerial decisions.The bot will decide what is the absolute best
(and even help compensate everyone who was looking for something different)
Dividing chores, deciding on food and movies, voting, managing, - any group decisions. No strategies, no overthinking, no haggling, no arguments.
Deciding on Food
You and some of your team-mates are going together to lunch. There are three options to chose from: Chinese, Indian and Italian places. All four of you have different preferences and come to lunch often.
First, you install the Games of Ni for you team. 
Hit 'Add to slack' button to install Games of Ni.
Next set up your timezone with /set_timezone command. The command takes one argument and "utc-4", "utc+3" are examples of valid format.
Set timezone before you can create games and bid.
Now you can set up a new game for deciding on where to go for lunch today. To do this invoke /create_game command and specify name of the game, end time by which the decision needs to be made and options that are available (you can create a game without options too, and the winner will be the one who picks the place). Option names should be one word each - everything delimeted by a space will be considered a separate option.
First create a new game and make a first bid.
Once the game is created eveyone can make bids for their preferred options. You can make your first bid through /bid command. Every consecutive bid made by you in this game will overwrite the previous bid.
The mechanism used to resolve a game of Ni is a second-price auction. The beauty of the second-price auction is that nobody has an incentive to bid anything other than his true value. The highest bid wins, but only pays the second-highest bid as a price. This way the winner is always the one who desires something the most, but everyone else is rightfully compensated. The bids are also sealed and nobody (except for an impartial slack bot) can see other people's valuations. Why do we need values and bids? More on that below.
Current games open to bidding can be requested with /games command
Use /games command to find open games.
At due time the game will be over, and the bot will stop accepting bids for it. The bot will then announce finished game in the channel that you set up for games of ni in the beginning.
Results are posted once game is over.
Why bids
The idea of bidding a monetary value for something may seem too economical. However, we do not imply that money have to physically change hands every time. In fact, we hope for the opposite. The real money bids represent "i owe you"s. For instance, after going for Japanese lunch today, I promise to compensate you properly next time. Or, maybe, I will just pay for lunch.
The trick is that the winner will have to pay the second highest bid in the group as a reimbursment for imposing his will on everyone.
The only role the money play is helping bots compare valuations of arbitrary things between people, telling us how much I like Japanese cuisine more than you. Money is a common denominator, after all, this is why it is so popular. And then we know, how big of a favor I owe you next time, and if we are having your favorite then.
We had written up a little more on the subject in a separate section.
Privacy policy
By adding the app you only give the bot permission to post into the selected channel. Installation will also add slash commands that may be invoked to interact with Games of Ni bot. We have no access to your private data, messages or email address.
Coming soon
Power of Ni is working hard to bring you these important updates first:
- Human-readable date time formats parsing, e.g. auction that ends "tomorrow" etc.
- Proper handling of chores and negative goods
- Budget tracking
The date time parsing is coming in the first update.
The Power of Ni plans to expand the Games of Ni to cover a wide variety of decisions with ready templates, incorporate combinatorial bids, public goods, efficient allocation solvers, token tracking and a lot of fresh economic ideas.
The more accurately can we capture your preferences, the ever-wider will be the scope of Games of Ni.