Game Theory

Archive for Game Theory

BMS ep. 142: Explaining John Nash’s Dissertation

I don’t mean to shock you but Ron Howard / Russell Crowe got it wrong.

Economists: Spell Out Your Premises

I think this is probably a phenomenon that happens in all disciplines, but I know economics so that’s where I see it. Anyway, while helping some of the Texas Tech grad students study for their qualifiers, I noticed that it’s hard to answer economics questions, when you don’t know what assumptions the professor has in […]

Voting “Strategically” Is Nonsense

If this doesn’t start a bunch of fights, I don’t know what will. An excerpt: Immanuel Kant famously posited the Categorical Imperative, which says that you ought to obey rules that you can consistently wish others to obey. Even more famously, Jesus posited the golden rule. I have no problem with any of this. Indeed, as […]

John Nash’s Contribution to Game Theory

I wrote a pretty long post at Mises Canada trying to give the average person a real sense of what Nash did in his dissertation. Ron Howard is not the hero of my post. An excerpt: The central result from the work of vNM was the minimax theorem. The full details are here, but the […]

Couples Therapy

OK, I opened Pandora’s Box with this post, so I might as well close it. (You’ll have to read the post and skim the comments to get up to speed.) In the below, I’ll walk through the analysis for the village having a total of one, two, and three couples. (Note that the couples have […]

Game Theory, Rational Women, and Dead Husbands

I also manage to contradict Tyler Cowen in this one. There’s a lot going on, it’s a jumbled mess. Just click through if you’re interested.

My Thoughts on Formalism in Economics

Recently many econobloggers have offered their thoughts on what is often called “mathematics in economics,” but I think is really more about formalistic model building in economics. Here’s a very interesting post that has links to some of the other people in this dispute. For my part, just some scattered observations with no necessarily overarching […]

Potpourri

==> An interesting story of a professor who purposely let his class “cheat” on a Game Theory exam in order to teach game theory. ==> Can’t remember if I already linked to this: The formal details of my June 3 debate with Warren Mosler, at Columbia University, moderated by John Carney of CNBC. (Yes it’s […]