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Game Theory: Open Access textbook

arxiv.org

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Re: Game Theory: Open Access textbook

#41

Post by [deleted] »

mud_dauber wrote: post #40
ucaetano wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More of a high-level mindset, since GT is more of an academic topic. A lot of the effects described in GT can be learned by practice and observation of human competitive behavior, but studying it gives you a much better understanding of why certain situations happen, or how competitors will react. The market entry game (retaliate/accommodate) is usually the best example: https://books.google.com/books?id=xhAACwAAQBAJ…

The signaling example is quite interesting. Thank you

[deleted]

Re: Game Theory: Open Access textbook

#42

Post by TheGorramBatman »

lynal wrote: post #24

There are many sources to develop an understanding of game theory. To build mastery in game theory, check out Osborne and Rubinstein's text. The authors offer it as a free download ( http://arielrubinstein.tau.ac.il/books.html ). This is the text used by advanced graduate students, the material is explained precisely.

It's a pretty intro level book, but a great one.

I'd say its suitable for maybe junior level undergraduates.

Re: Game Theory: Open Access textbook

#43

Post by madhadron »

ianai wrote: post #8
tramGG wrote: post #2

I'm looking to learn Game Theory. Anyone with knowledge in this space have good additional recommendations?

I had a professor once classify GT as a sub set of statistical decision theory. Might be worth picking up a SDT text. Does anyone ever read Theory of Games by von Neumann?

This is backwards. Decision theory, which is the foundation of inference in statistics today (Bayesian, minimax, etc. are all special cases of it) is formulated as a one player game. Certain things mesh nicely when you realize this. For example, we know that there is a Nash equilibrium for large classes of games if we allow random strategies. Likewise, for decision theory with nonconvex loss functions, optimal procedures are almost always random.

But: game theory of two or more players is qualitatively different. For a one player game, we speak of optimal strategies. For multiplayer, noncooperative games, Nash equilibria take what would seem to be the obvious generalization of that and twist it in a whole new direction.

Re: Game Theory: Open Access textbook

#44

Post by madhadron »

tramGG wrote: post #2

I'm looking to learn Game Theory. Anyone with knowledge in this space have good additional recommendations?

I really enjoyed Gintis's 'Game Theory Evolving', which focuses on evolutionary game theory. Mind you, I was a biologist when I was working with it, so that was much more relevant to what I was thinking about.

Re: Game Theory: Open Access textbook

#45

Post by bo1024 »

wenc wrote: post #13

Has anyone here applied Game Theory to a real-world productionized problem? I'm curious. There are many hypothetical situations where game theory is said to be useful, but I've never seen an application of it in real life.

Not myself (well one of the below applied to me at a brief point in my career), but here are cases I know of.

Google, Facebook, and many others use mechanism design (which roughly counts as game theory) to design ad auctions which automatically run as users run searches and load pages. That must be the biggest application of game theory in running code. Auctions are popular applications of game theory in other places, particularly the FCC spectrum auction which involves running code.

Game theory, of a kind, underlies "match" code that assigns medical residents to hospitals, and students to highschools in some school districts in the USA.

Game theory has actually been used to design security schedules for 'national security' in places like airports and the Coast Guard -- this research was led by an effort at USC.

Game theory is used in the design of prediction markets, which are often deployed within companies (though probably they don't need to do additional theory to deploy the markets to their application).

There is a lot of crowdsourcing at scale going on in semi-automated systems, and a lot of research on game theory in crowdsourcing, but I don't know how much that research gets implemented.

If Uber and Lyft aren't using a bit of game theory to set prices, and hopefully also think about incentives when assigning routes, then they're crazy. But perhaps they're using more "economics" than game theory.

Game theory has been used to study social voting sites and "contests" like reddit, hackernews, stackoverflow, quora. However, I don't know if any of the designers of these sites are explicitly using game theory.

Re: Game Theory: Open Access textbook

#48

Post by ivansavz »

Aside: I misinterpreted the title as saying "applying game theory to OER textbooks" and imagined a paper discussing the incentives/payouts for creators of educational content like textbooks.

Some possible moves:

     - Write for a mainstream publisher (payout: ~5% royalties, reach: medium)
     - Self publish commercially (payout: 45%+ royalties from createspace/lulu, reach: small)
     - Release for free as OER under public domain / CC0 (no payout, reach: broad)
I'm fascinated by the interplay between the for-money publishing business and the idea of open source content, and would really love to see a paper studying this subject. Some concrete questions: 1. If an author is interested in maximizing total payout, should she write for a mainstream publisher or self-publish? 2. If an author is interested in most educational impact (maximize the number of readers), should she pursue a one of the commercial routes (publish or self-publish) or release the book as public domain?

The answer to 2. is not obvious: some of the best textbooks I know are free (GFDL, CC *, or public domain because old), but somehow they don't get the respect they deserve because people have the perception of "free" as being somehow inferior quality. People think, if the book really was any good, surely you'd have to pay for it?

Even more interesting is to consider the game theoretic aspects of multiple authors/contributors. Why are software projects on githun with hundreds of collaborators the norm, but textbooks project limited to one or few main authors?

Re: Game Theory: Open Access textbook

#49

Post by qubex »

wenc wrote: post #13

Has anyone here applied Game Theory to a real-world productionized problem? I'm curious. There are many hypothetical situations where game theory is said to be useful, but I've never seen an application of it in real life.

I’m an applied mathematician that eventually became a macroeconomist by way of game theory.

The answer to your question depends very sensibly on what you mean by the terms you use. Certainly various kind of game theoretic solutions to problems are used daily everywhere, from auctions on eBay, to what kind of policies to adopt in government, to how HFT hedge funds choose their positions, to what captains of industry choose to do in their boardrooms.

Since this is a technical environment, I’ll suggest you take a look at Game Theory for Wireless Engineers which applies Game Theory to the environment of self-interested nodes competing to get the best signal they can on a network that is a commons.

http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00014ED1V01Y2...

Re: Game Theory: Open Access textbook

#50

Post by wenc »

qubex wrote: post #49
wenc wrote: post #13

Has anyone here applied Game Theory to a real-world productionized problem? I'm curious. There are many hypothetical situations where game theory is said to be useful, but I've never seen an application of it in real life.

I’m an applied mathematician that eventually became a macroeconomist by way of game theory. The answer to your question depends very sensibly on what you mean by the terms you use. Certainly various kind of game theoretic solutions to problems are used daily everywhere, from auctions on eBay, to what kind of policies to adopt in government, to how HFT hedge funds choose their positions, to what captains of industry c…

I wasn't too clear in my verbiage, but I guess by "applied" I mean actual game-theoretic computations (what is known as algorithmic game theory) being implemented in code, as opposed to a broad allusions to canonical problems like the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Game Theory for Wireless Engineers is interesting, and I wonder if this is actually being applied in industry, or if it is in the realm of potential application?

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