Note that the final plot device where one player does not know the rules of the game has not been encompassed by standard game theory.
Top Posts
- How To Open A Bag of Charcoal
- What is the Recommended Serving Temperature for Guinness?
- Jeff's Intermediate Micro Course
- Why Is It A Crime To Park Facing The Wrong Way?
- Keith Jarrett: The Art of Improvisation
- Who We Are
- Ethan Iverson on Paul Bley
- Why Does the Fastest Swimmer Anchor a Relay?
- The Best At What They Do
- Left, Right, Then Left Again
Tags
art
art of office politics
banana seeds
blog
books
boston
california
chicago
coffee
computers
crime
current events
decision-making
economics
education
evolution
family
financial crisis
food and wine
friends
funny
game theory
incentives
iPhone
kludge
language
law
marriage
maths
movies
music
obama
politics
psychology
publishing
sandeep has bad taste
sanitation
sport
statistics
suicide
teaching
terrorism
the web
tomatoes
travel
TV
vapor mill
war
winter
writing
Subscribe via RSS
Jeff’s Twitter Feed
- Congratulations Northwestern Economics Graduates Class of 2020 #NU2020 #WCAS2020 @WeinbergCollege https://t.co/nY6z4hwqOO 3 months ago
- re-upping this: cheaptalk.org/2011/09/21/can… 1 year ago
- Today the Supreme Court ruled that partisan gerrymandering is not something that the judicial system can regulate.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1 year ago
- “We are all just prisoners here of our own device” used to be a clever turn of phrase using a subtle form of the ve… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1 year ago
- Wait, then how'd they get the toothpaste in there in the first place? 2 years ago
3 comments
Comments feed for this article
February 15, 2012 at 9:37 am
Dan Hirschman
It seems that Wesley’s actual strategy – change the rules in a way that the other player can’t detect until it’s too late – is both pervasive in real conflicts and hard to model. Thomas Schelling discusses this problem at length in “Strategy of Conflict”, I think, and for that reason always seemed more skeptical to the intense modeling efforts on the actual game forms themselves. All the interesting stuff is what happens leading up to the game – the deceit, trickery, maneuvering, establishing or severing of communication lines, etc. What happened to push game theory down the extreme modeling approach?
February 15, 2012 at 10:21 am
Brad L
This reminds me of the following two papers:
1. Crawford, V. P. (2003). Lying for Strategic Advantage: Rational and Boundedly Rational Misrepresentation of Intentions. The American Economic Review, 93(1), 133–149. doi:10.2307/3132165
Here deception can work with non-equilibrium K-Level thinkers, and foil people who think one level too far.
2. Foster, D. P., & Young, H. P. (2001). On the impossibility of predicting the behavior of rational agents. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(22), 12848–12853. doi:10.1073/pnas.211534898
Agents in a rock paper scissors game without knowledge of each other’s payoffs eventually form far from equilibrium conjectures about what the other will do.
February 17, 2012 at 10:54 am
Kevin Hutch
It’s funny, I always describe game theory to laymen as the mathematical formalization of this scene.