Thursday, February 11, 2010

Kevin Morrison, Duke Student

This Slate article gives major props to my man Kevin Morrison, Duke Phd and now asst prof at Cornell.

Everybody should study game theory. Or else get hammered by it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"By requiring a majority (at least) in two separate chambers to pass legislation, the founders created a situation in which most members of Congress can favor a bill but it still gets blocked. "They set us up for not passing laws," Roth says."

Amen.

Unknown said...

Concerning PD: The individual dem holds out because he/she wants some concessions; it seems like changing the payoffs to add incentives would be a solution to the current proposal, but increase the future incentive to hold out. It seems removing the possibility of concessions or added incentives to hold outs would be the only long term solution to this iterated game. However, I also see that there is an antagonism between the rules applied to the continuous game and the individual actors who serve finite terms. This is the main dilemma of our system. For instance, while its better to have bribery absent from political decisions, the short-term actor would only want it to be abolished after he's received his benefit. Another example: its in the interest of a president to artificially stimulate the economy and expand credit/lower interest rates to stimulate a boom before the election, even if he believes many of the investments will turn out sour in the long-run when he's reelected or out of office.