Bad Design

I'm in a hotel. This hotel has two elevators, independently controlled. So pressing a button on one side of the wall is guaranteed to summon the elevator on that side despite the other side having already been pressed.

There is a problem. The rational move is to always press both, even though it's selfish or wasteful. It's the fastest way to get where you're going but is also guaranteed to waste an elevator summon. So you get a tragedy of the commons situation.

There is no blame to any individual who does this. It is the rational thing to do. This is a problem of poor systems design. When you make the selfish move globally optimal and always available what exactly are you expecting? Don't design systems like this.

The correct thing to do here is to make a better elevator scheduler.