Someone asks you a question and you have an intuitive understanding of precisely what is being asked. If you are not a game theorist you stop there and answer.
If you are a game theorist you start to analyze the question and discover that, as with all language there is some ambiguity. There’s more than one way to answer the question, the answer could be very detailed or just straightforward, the question might actually be rhetorical, there may be some implicit message to you in the question.
You begin to analyze how else she might have posed the same question. The fact that she chose this particular wording over another gives you clues about what precisely she is getting at. By a process of elimination this leads you to refine your interpretation of the question.
But if you are just a mediocre game theorist its pretty likely your analysis is totally wrong and you are worse off than if you hadn’t ever thought to analyze it. Indeed there is a good reason that your intuitive interpretation was the right one. Because the language evolved that way. And the evolution was probably so complex that there is no way a mediocre game theorist could have traced through the path of evolution to deduce that interpretation.
This is like how drugs can be found from compounds that have evolved in the plant and animal kingdom despite the fact that science has no way of knowing how to synthesize those.
And of course pretty much all of us are mediocre game theorists at best.
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May 28, 2012 at 10:53 pm
afinetheorem
Of course, this is essentially Burke’s argument for conservatism more generally…(and there is an enormous amount of commentary on Burke’s point that we should be skeptical of replacing well-established customs and norms with new ones; much of this commentary is convincing, and can be directly applied here.)
May 28, 2012 at 11:11 pm
Anonymous
The same holds for Beckerian price theory.
May 28, 2012 at 11:20 pm
Miraj Patel
Isn’t “game theorist” too broad a term in your example? It is really a “game theorist who is mediocre in analyzing rhetoric” who is worse off than the “non-game theorist who does not analyze rhetoric”. Not even sure if “game theorist” is needed actually…
May 29, 2012 at 5:52 am
Bruno Salcedo
However, being a game theorist does not imply that you blindly trust game theory over your intuition.
You might very well be a game theorist and know that you are a mediocre game theorist at best.
In this case, you might treat the recommendations of the theory as another “expert” that competes with your intuition in giving you advise.
And, despite what the theory tells you, you might still go with your intuitive answer just because you know that the theory (or your understanding of it) is far from being perfect.
I would say that its better to me a non-game theorist than to be a game theorist who thinks too much of him/herself.
May 29, 2012 at 10:38 am
Jonathan Weinstein
Bart Lipman said in an interview that people become decision theorists because they are bad at making decisions and hope that somehow studying decision theory will help (usually a false hope, of course.)
The analogue would be becoming a game theorist because you don’t have an intuitive understanding of interactions.
May 29, 2012 at 10:53 am
Old Old School
What is the objective function in this problem? Two of many possibilities are: to understand the question as asked or to further some personal self-interest. If the answer is the former, then a valid strategy is to ask for clarification. If the answer is the latter, then some (of many possible) alternative strategies can be to answer the question that you wish she’d asked (i.e., framing) and/or to interpret her answers in the most favorable light (i.e., self-delusion). Game theory has a hard time endogenizing framing issues, but framing in gaming seems like just a another meta-level of game theory in general.
May 29, 2012 at 11:01 pm
Jonathan Weinstein
Your title reminds me of one of my favorite all-time TV exchanges, from the series “Rome”:
Gaius Octavian Caesar: At best I’ll be a middling swordsman.
Titus Pullo: It’s better than nothing.
Gaius Octavian Caesar: There you are wrong. The graveyards are full of middling swordsmen. Best not to be a swordsman at all than a middling swordsman.
May 30, 2012 at 12:09 pm
jdfarragut
A great game theorist (at least applied theorist) appeals first to intuition and then chooses the solution concept that maps to his intuitive conclusion. If it maps to more equilibria than he cares to consider, add the sentence “We focus on equilibria such that xyz.”
June 6, 2012 at 2:10 am
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