A Moral Dilemna - Should I lead or follow????

Should I lead or should I follow? Sometimes this is a moral dilemma which we face. Consider this situation. It is your anniversary today and also a public holiday. You have promised to take your spouse out to a movie. If you defect on your promise a potentially unbearable cost is imposed. Hence you decide to go to the movie theater and buy tickets in advance rather than risk bearing the cost. Assume that the theater only sells 100 tickets (5 movies 20 seats each) a day of which only 25 tickets (5 tickets for each movie) are sold in advance. Also assume that you did not choose the movie you want to go to in advance. You do not have any information on the relative merits or demerits of a given movie. Hence one optimal selection rule could be to follow others making the choices. For instance if you find that people are quickly making a bee line for one movie, the likelihood of the movie being good is higher and hence you choose to go for that. Like you 50 others are also celebrating their anniversary and the same rules of the game as above apply to them.

Question: Would you want to wait for others to make a choice before deciding?

Obviously the answer is no. Given that there are 50 people and only 25 tickets, if you wait sufficiently long the likelihood of you getting a ticket (for any movie) is virtually zero. Hence this is a situation where leading seems to be better than following. But is this generally the case?

Now lets move to the later part of the evening. You decide that you like to delve into the wild west for the evening and buy tickets to watch the movie titled Crazy Horse. Leaving the cosmetics aside, lets get into the climax. The scene starts with the camera giving wide angle shots of this dusty lil town. People are lazing around with seemingly no work to do. The calm is suddenly disturbed as a fight breaks out between two people in the saloon over the barmaid. As was the case in the middle of the 19th century, disputes were settled with guns.

Let the protagonist be Mr. Sitting Bull and the antagonist be Mr. Crazy Horse. The two are staring at each other with murderous intentions. The townsfolk are scattered around watching. The wild west believed in fair play and there were rules for gun fights. A critical element in any gunfight is that both fighters should have a fair chance and hence drawing the gun too quickly results in foul play which in turn implies that the fighter who draws early will be lynched (implies death through torture of some kind in this situation) by the folks in town.

Now here is the dilemma facing Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The only way to survive is killing the opponent. But either of the fighters do not want to draw early and risk getting lynched. Consider the case of Crazy Horse, if he were to draw he needs some reason to believe that Sitting Bull is making the attempt simultaneously. This implies that there is a good chance that he might not make the first draw. But we know that the person drawing first has the maximum chance of success but at the same time also has the maximum chance of being lynched.

And now with the tension gripping, you turn to your spouse and ask her. So my lady would you follow or lead? Essentially the question is put yourself in the shoes of either Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse and then decide what would your choice be.

And so the answer is?????????????????????