Its Facebook wonky. You will probably get a bunch of spank the monkey and kill the researcher comments. Could be wrong. If you do, Kh will need a detailed explanation on spanking the monkey.

The Monkey will only take one banana. I do have Peter Gabriel singing Shock the Monkey in my head though.

Cage 2 :-)

The original premise is too vague to really make a prediction.

I am assuming that the monkey that loses one banana, is experiencing Socialism. And that the "researcher" is the government.

Then: the question is how long will the button pushing monkey tolerate giving up half of his earnings, for the sake of getting a banana?

And...if he accepts the loss of half of his earnings until the shock increases, will he just get rid of his 'homeless' cage inhabitant, hoping to either get all of the reward, or less of the shock?

Pointless...since it could very well be that the button pushing monkey is 'cool' with one of the bananas, and not give it any further thought.

The "researcher" may not really have a role....

I would actually expect the monkeys to start fighting amongst each other trying to use the other monkey to set off the shock.

I say both cases are the same.
Case 1: The monkeys can buy a banana for the price of receiving a shock.
Case 2: Monkey A can buy a banana for Monkey B at the price of Monkey A receiving a shock. This is a complication b/c each monkey wants a banana for himself, not the other one, but they are incapable of getting a banana on their own. So they develop a barter system in which they trade bananas for bananas b/c they both have the ability to produce something the other needs. This is a simplified version of an economy in which each participant has unique sets of things they can produce efficiently and want to consume.

I'm assuming that the monkey who pushes the button gets both bananas (unless the researcher intervenes).

As the problem is stated, it appears that the shock is delivered to both monkeys in the cage. Is this correct?

Using the above assumptions, I would say cage 1. My reasoning is as follows.

In cage 1, the button-pusher gets a shock and bananas. He has to make a tradeoff of 'are two bananas worth the shock?' The other monkey gets a shock at a random time, caused by the button-pusher. The button-pusher gets a small positive value (bananas-when-I-want-them - shock-at-chosen-time). The non-button-pusher gets a larger negative value (shock-at-an-arbitrary-time, with no bananas)

In cage 2, once the monkeys get the hang of what the researcher is doing, the calculation on whether or not to press the button is 'is one banana worth the shock?' Here, the value formula for the other monkey isn't that different from the button pusher, but is definitely less and may be negative (banana-when-I-want-it - shock-at-chosen-time) vs (banana-at-an-arbitrary-time - shock-at-arbitrary-time)

Changing the severity of the shock has much less of an impact on cage 2 versus cage 1.

In the two scenarios, the non-button-pushing monkey is affected much more negatively in cage 1, and sees the other monkey as the source of his pain.

Not going well. They're all talking about starving monkeys even though I never implied that the dispensers ever ran out of bananas... No one has even bothered with a straight 1 or 2 answer.

The socialist cage. Good analogy..... let us know if they get it or not.... (I'm not holding my breath... they'll ridicule it before they try to actually think about it and let it sink in....sorry...)