Game Theory | Hacker News Reader

Game Theory

plato.stanford.edu

109 pointsjcr19 comments

I'm wondering, what perspective does philosophy add to game theory? All of the philosophical musings at the beginning of the article seem to describe what "moral" beings should do. This seems unrelated to what "rational" agents must do, which is one of the simpler questions of game theory. Do philosophical arguments guide, for example, how one might design utility functions? I have studied enough game theory and attended enough conferences and his hasn't showed up except to argue that a definition is perhaps reasonable (and then we wait for the elegant algorithm/analysis punchline anyway).

I think game theory isn't too concerned about how one might design utility functions, it is mostly interested in what one should do when utility functions are already given

But the usefulness of game theory is pinned on the accuracy of utility functions.

> what "rational" agents must do, which is one of the simpler questions of game theory

In this way, is Game Theory on the opposite side of Behavioral Economics?

The interest in choice architecture and motivations lead me to think they were related and aligned. Behavioral Economics, afaiu, doesn't count on a heck of rational agency.

What are some good applications of game theory? Where is it used usefully in the real world?

The design of online auctions and markets.

It gives some insight on how we can design bidding and pricing systems to ensure that people only ever attempt to bid what they truly think an item is worth, given what they know and what they think other bidders know.

The broader goals are to establish when these systems might be "incentive compatible" (truthful bidding) and whether or not these results are robust to variations on the assumed information structure (assumptions governing what agents know, what they think other agents know, and so on).

For the HN crowd, it seems like the related field of algorithmic game theory is more practical. It focuses mainly on the implementation and complexity of various auction pricing mechanisms.

The section on 'coordination games and conventions' is also quite interesting and related to problems in distributed computing. For instance, byzantine fault tolerance and common knowledge of global state shares many similarities with economic systems in which many dispersed agents with subjective beliefs about the 'true state' of the world wish to come to some consensus over some market equilibria or economic fundamentals such as interest rates or market prices in the presence of faulty communication and/or strategic trading behaviours.

In these cases, game theory may provide insights on more robust fault tolerant designs, and economic policies that lead to stabler, and more efficient markets.

Cold wars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction

Evolutionary biology

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_game_theory

Any recommendations for the best online course on game theory?

3-4 years ago I watched the Ben Polak/Yale Game Theory course on Youtube, very well explained, and it was a great refresher for me https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6EF60E1027E1A10B

Not exactly an "online course", but these notes (used for an undergrad course on games) I found quite readable: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/games/

I can recommend the book 'A Course in Game Theory' by Ariel Rubinstein and Martin J. Osborne . You'll probably need some mathematical and economic background knowledge to gain the most out of it. Note that it is more abstract than illustrative though it is aimed at a beginner in Game Theory.

The book ist free to download after a simple registration at http://arielrubinstein.tau.ac.il/books.html

That's a good book, but a bit advanced. A little bit easier is Osborne's Introduction to Game Theory.

On the heavier side, Game Theory by Tirole and Fudenberg is used in a lot of graduate economics programs.

Unfortunately, "Game Theory" is a huge field. If you want to limit things down to just "Algorithmic Game Theory" there are tons of courses and resources out there...

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~mkearns/teaching/cgt/

http://www.math.mcgill.ca/~vetta/CS764.dir/

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs684/2004sp/

http://theory.stanford.edu/~tim/f04/364a.html

http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~naor/COURSE/agt-fkn.html

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~christos/games/cs294.html

http://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs455/

http://www.daimi.au.dk/~bromille/AGT/index.html

http://www.cs.duke.edu/courses/fall06/cps296.2/

http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/agta/

I don't know about best, but there are a couple of MOOCs on coursera titled "Competitive strategy" and "Advanced competitive strategy" by Tobias Kretschmer of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. They deal with with game theory from a business point of view and are pretty good starting point.

Not strictly online, but this course is very good. Unfortunately, a little pricey.

http://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/games-people-play-gam...

SEP is a wonderful online resource for philosophy. You can easily get lost browsing articles for hours if you're not careful!

some cool subtopics-

matching theory: how to match kidney donors with patients? how to match kids with public schools?

social choice theory: how does the voting mechanism affect the outcome? how much weight should different parties have? how can voting mechanisms be "gamed"?

Very interesting

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