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John Adams Blog

The blog of The Antient and Honourable John Adams Society, Minnesota's Conservative Debating Society www.johnadamssociety.org

Thursday, February 09, 2006

Game Theory applied to Practical Problems

Harsh Pencil and I were talking before the debate last Wednesday, and the issue of Game Theory came up. Given that Mr. Pencil is an economist and I am not, I'll leave it to you, Gentle Reader, to ascertain which of the two of us first uttered the phrase 'Game Theory'. Yet, as usual, the conversation was interesting and enlightening.

I today discovered, via The Corner, a more practical application of Game Theory that I thought I'd share. Hopefully, Harsh Pencil can weigh in with his analysis.

Blogger Harsh Pencil said...

I read that paper yesterday. (It's a game theoretic study of leaving the toilet seat up or down). My main conclusion is why it's a good thing that most of the action in game theory moved from math to economics. The author, a mathematician, simply screws it up. When economists do game theory, they see it as a tool for analysing conflict. (My former colleague, Roger Myerson wrote a textbook called "Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict"). This yoyo goes to all the trouble of formally setting up the problem between a co-habitating man and woman and then tries to figure out what's fair, as opposed to what we should expect to happen (as any good economist would do). Feh!

11:12 AM, February 10, 2006  

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