It is lunchtime.

1. Every player (whether she be an engineer or a marketer or anything else) is invested in whatever she is working on.
2. She is hungry, but she has work to do, and she is making progress on said work. She would like to continue making progress on said work, as she’s getting substantial utility out of it. Also, inertia is a real thing. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_inertia)
3. She expects that some people must be hungrier than her, and will get up from their desks to start going out to lunch. She uses a simple heuristic: It would be wasteful of her to try and persuade others to leave for lunch. Instead, she will leave that onerous task to people who are hungrier than she.
4. Humorously, every single person in the office is experiencing roughly the same amount of hunger. The exceptionally-hungry people are not in the office today- they’re usually the ones who lead the charge.
5. We end up with a suboptimal Nash equilibrium (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium). Ideally, everybody would spontaneously drop their work and head out to get lunch. But instead, everybody remains fixed, waiting for a cue that never comes.

So hungry.

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