11–20 of 25 posts
I believe (not an expert) it is more important to minimize losses that to maximize wins in game theory (cold war roots). Viewed in that light most game theory results are, in fact, extremely intuitive.
These are interesting examples of using game theory to model certain situations but none of these examples show that game theory "tells us" something about the world. In broad strokes, game theory claims to have a descriptive model of human behavior but people very rarely follow the predictions of game theory (and that is even when you're in situations that are simple enough to have a stab at applying game theory). T…
> In broad strokes, game theory claims to have a descriptive model of human behavior Huh? Game theory is the study of strategy. It's not attempting to describe how people actually behave, but how they should behave if they want to achieve a specific outcome when interacting with other people.
Some games, like second price auctions (under certain assumptions about people's values for the good, and knowledge of their own and other people's values) have so called dominant strategy equalibria. In this case, you can say how a person should act regardless of how others act.
But these scenarios are the exception rather than the rule.
One more for your list: • Shameless self-promotion and "Source" attribution links that all lead to your own YouTube videos will annoy people, but probably get you more traffic.
well, in his defence - > Every voting system is manipulable
"Every Voting System is Manipulable" is an exaggeration of the implications of strategic voting. Yes, the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem proves that a dishonest vote could profitably exist in any system, however there are already systems where intentionally doing so requires the voter to: 1) Have perfect (or near-perfect) information about exactly how everyone else is voting, and 2) Solve an NP-hard math problem.
When breaking the vote requires more knowledge than any politician has, and more computing power than breaking the cryptography of all the world's banks, I'd say it's not particularly manipulable.
> Closing roads can improve everyone’s commute time. SimCity is a great way of showing this effect interactively. In the simulation, citizens always take the shortest path (individuals try to maximize individual gain), but if you connect your entire city like a grid they avoid high-speed roads, deadlocking the traffic (worst game outcome). If you adopt a city plan full of cul-de-sacs and connect it with high-speed ro…
A more reasonable model (and why gridded streets work in the real world) would have people who desire to go to different places in the grid.
"Soccer players should kick toward their weaker side more frequently than their stronger side." I thought this was an interesting result, so I took a look at the source. It turns out it is a toy problem where the goalie always stops the penelty kick if she guesses right and the kicker always makes the goal if kicking to one side, and misses with some probability when kicking to the other. This is clearly a toy proble…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In broad strokes, game theory claims to have a descriptive model of human behavior Huh? Game theory is the study of strategy. It's not attempting to describe how people actually behave, but how they should behave if they want to achieve a specific outcome when interacting with other people.
No, it does not say how people should behave? It analyzes strategic situations using various equilibrium concepts, such as the Nash equilibrium. If you are not sure that your opponent will play the Nash equilibrium strategy, Game theory doesn't tell you what you should do.
> Closing roads can improve everyone’s commute time. SimCity is a great way of showing this effect interactively. In the simulation, citizens always take the shortest path (individuals try to maximize individual gain), but if you connect your entire city like a grid they avoid high-speed roads, deadlocking the traffic (worst game outcome). If you adopt a city plan full of cul-de-sacs and connect it with high-speed ro…
Doesn't some of this behavior come from the rather preposterous way simcity models its drivers? A model where there is no persistent data and the heuristic is instead "go to nearest house and declare that home, if someone beat me there go to the next nearest house" naturally lends itself to a tree model, as no one actually wants to go anywhere but the next link in the chain! A more reasonable model (and why gridded s…
Grid layouts don't optimize for heavy traffic [1] because drivers choose shorter paths, making it worse for all [2]. In real life you don't have grid layouts without large roads, one-way streets, overpasses and other ways to improve flow.
A tree layout avoids this by directing through traffic to higher-capacity roads without intersections [3]. The downside is that individual commutes get longer. It's just one possible solution, but an interesting one because it improves traffic (removes the Prisioner's dillema) by closing roads (denying options to the game actors).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_plan#Late_19th_century_to_...
"Soccer players should kick toward their weaker side more frequently than their stronger side." I thought this was an interesting result, so I took a look at the source. It turns out it is a toy problem where the goalie always stops the penelty kick if she guesses right and the kicker always makes the goal if kicking to one side, and misses with some probability when kicking to the other. This is clearly a toy proble…
You could show the same thing by relaxing those assumptions. It would just require a lot more algebra. The key insight is that, holding everything else constant (which is done in the lecture), weakening your accuracy to one side increases the probability you target that side.
You have taken things to an absurd extreme and gotten one result, I can "relax the assumptions" to the opposite extreme and get the opposite result:
Suppose the goalie only blocks 10% of shots when guessing correctly, and the kicker makes 80% to the strong side and 50% to the weak side. In this model it is obviously better to always kick to the strong side.
After that revelation, I started pushing towards longer term incentives to incent better behaviors. "We're only working with a smaller subset of vendors, who can count on repeat business, as long as they don't get kicked out of the club. But they need to make investments in advance to show they're serious."
In general getting clients and partners to repeat games of Prisoner's Dilemma rather than 1-offs is the key to trust, and long term profitability.