I’m going to ask again, is some of this being–coming out of the fog? I mean, you may not understand it with algebra before but some of these sorts of pictures have you seen before? It’s good review exercise for some of you who are–who have taken 115 or are about to take 150 or are there now. So we found precisely one point on this best response picture, and there’s a lot of points to find, and it’s 20 past 12, so we better get going.
2 Games and Rationality
Interestingly, data collected from championship tennis matches has shown that the serve-and-return behaviour of professional players is consistent with both von Neumann’s Minimax Theory and Nash’s generalisation. She stops when she approaches a red light and she continues without concern when she approaches a green light. It is a Nash equilibrium when all drivers behave this way. When approaching a red light it is best to stop since the crossing traffic has a green light and will continue. When approaching a green light it is best to continue since the crossing traffic has a red light and will stop. Thus it is in each driver’s own interest to play her part in the equilibrium, given that everyone else does.
We don’t yet have enough concepts introduced to be able to show how to represent these outcomes in terms of utility functions—but by the time we’re finished we will, and this will provide the key to solving our puzzle from Section 1. It was said above that the distinction between sequential-move and simultaneous-move games is not identical to the distinction between perfect-information and imperfect-information games. Explaining why this is so is a good way of establishing full understanding of both sets of concepts. As simultaneous-move games were characterized in the previous paragraph, it must be true that all simultaneous-move games are games of imperfect information.
In such games, actions that reveal or conceal information play crucial roles. The field of “information economics” has clarified many previously puzzling features of corporate governance and industrial organization, and has proved equally useful in political science, studies of contract and tort law, and even biology. The award of the Nobel Memorial Prize in 2001 to its pioneers, George Akerlof, Michael Spence, and Joseph Stiglitz, testifies to its importance.
Suppose that we ignore rocks and cobras for a moment, and imagine that the bridges are equally safe. Suppose also that the fugitive has no special knowledge about his pursuer that might lead him to venture a specially conjectured probability distribution over the pursuer’s available strategies. In this case, the fugitive’s best course is to roll a three-sided die, in which each side represents a different bridge (or, more conventionally, a six-sided die in which each bridge is represented by two sides). He must then pre-commit himself to using whichever bridge is selected by this randomizing device. The fugitive now has a 2/3 probability of escaping and the pursuer a 1/3 probability of catching him. Neither the fugitive nor the pursuer can improve their chances given the other’s randomizing mix, so the two randomizing strategies are in Nash equilibrium.
Anne Osbourn on The Best Science Books of 2020: The Royal Society Book Prize
Similar concerns about allegedly individualistic foundations of game theory have been echoed by another philosopher, Martin Hollis and economists Robert Sugden and Michael Bacharach . In particular, it motivated Bacharach to propose a theory of team reasoning, which was completed by Sugden, along with Nathalie Gold, after Bacharach’s death. This theory constitutes a key part of the background context for appreciating the value of a major recent extension to game theory, Wynn Stirling’s theory of conditional games. As noted in Section 2.7above, when observed behavior does not stabilize around equilibria in a game, and there is no evidence that learning is still in process, the analyst should infer that she has incorrectly modeled the situation she is studying.
This game also has the feature that the more effort the other person–the more the other person does–the more you want to do. The more effort your partner provides into this project the more effort you want to provide in this project. These games in which the more the other person does the more I want to do, these are called games of strategic complements. So both the investment game and the game with–the partnership firm game are games with strategic complements. Perhaps the saddest part of online dating’s tragedy of the commons is that matches, unlike fish, are not remotely interchangeable. And yet, on many apps it’s difficult for one user to signal to another that he is deeply interested in her specifically and not merely trying his luck with everyone.
Larger human institutions are, famously, highly morally obtuse; however, commitment is typically crucial to their functional logic. A different sort of example is provided by Qantas Airlines of Australia. Qantas has never suffered a fatal accident, and for a time (until it suffered some embarrassing non-fatal accidents to which it likely feared drawing attention) made much of this in its advertising. It likely still has incentive to take extra care to prevent its record of fatalities from crossing the magic reputational line between 0 and 1. Suppose you own a piece of land adjacent to mine, and I’d like to buy it so as to expand my lot. Unfortunately, you don’t want to sell at the price I’m willing to pay.
In the investment game, the more likely I was to invest, the more likely you–the more you wanted to invest. So this term here aq1is going to become an a and this term here -bq² is going to become a 2bq1and this term here, -b q1q2is going to become a -bq2, and the last term -cq1is going to become a -c. What I did was I differentiated this fairly simple function with respect to q1and since I want to find a maximum, what I’m going to do is I’m going to set this thing equal to 0. At my maximum, I’ll put a hat over it to indicate this is the argmax; at my maximum I’m going to set this thing equal to 0. Now, since we’re being nerdy in this class, despite our attempts to go dating, we’re being nerdy, let’s actually be a little bit careful. This was a first order condition or a first order necessary condition.
For example, when a person walks into a retail shop and sees a price tag on something she’d like to have, she knows without needing to conjecture or learn anything that she’s involved in a simple ‘take it or leave it’ game. In other markets, she might know she is expect to haggle, and know the rules for that too. In general, then, a game is partly defined by the payoffs assigned Look what to the players. In any application, such assignments should be based on sound empirical evidence. If a proposed solution involves tacitly changing these payoffs, then this ‘solution’ is in fact a disguised way of changing the subject and evading the implications of best modeling practice. Now apply Zermelo’s algorithm to the extensive form of our current example.