Film Criticism At Notre Dame
Robert Vienneau
history of economics have recently been made about the role and
accomplishments of the Nash equilibrium concept in game theory.
Much of this cynosure is due to the fact that a broad regiment
of economic theorists have recently sought to write von Neumann
out of the history of game theory to the maximum extent possible,
striving to supplant his legacy with the work of John Forbes Nash.
Gerard Debreu, for instance, pronounced: 'the six years that
followed the first edition of the work of von Neumann and
Morgenstern disappointed the expectations of the economists. Most
of the research done on the theory of games at that time focused
upon the MinMax theorem, which eventually moved off center stage,
and now plays a minor supporting role. Only after 1950, and in
particular after the publication of John Nash's one page article...
did the theory start again to acquire the dominant features that
characterize it today.' One would have thought that it was the
economists who had disappointed von Neumann. And was all that
activity at RAND - activity that Debreu had personnaly witnessed -
just an insignificant detour?
Kenneth Binmore presents the Nash equilibrium as the 'natural'
generalization of von Neumann's minimax, and then asks, 'Why did
von Neumann and Morgenstern not formulate this extension
themselves?' His answer was that they presciently foresaw the
problem of the multiplicity of Nash solutions, and 'therefore
said nothing at all rather than saying something perceived
as unsatisfactory'... If Binmore had attended more closely to
the text of _Theory of Games and Economic Behavior_ (TGEB), he
would have discovered that Von Neumann and Morgenstern positively
embraced the prospect of a multiplicity of solution points. In
Robert Aumann's historical exegesis of game theory, TGEB is
lauded as an 'outstanding event,' but then treated as a mere
transition between the earlier work of von Neumann (1928) and
the subsequent 'Nash program' (1951) of subsuming cooperative
games within noncooperative models. It is praised in a mildly
backhanded manner as breaking 'fundamental new ground' in
defining a cooperative game, the axiomatization of expected
utility, and making 'the first extensive applications of game
theory, mainly to economics'... All of these claims require a
fair supplement of interpretative license in order to accord
them legitimacy, something Aumann apparently felt no
compunction to supply. We have already noted in Chapter 3 that
TGEB bore negligible economic content and was not deeply
concerned with shoring up utility theory, for instance; the
idea that it set out to define the subset of 'cooperative games'
is a post hoc construct. And then there is the crusade by
numerous economists to fabricate a long and hallowed genealogy
for the Nash solution concept entirely bypassing von Neumann,
for, 'as everybody knows, Cournot formulated the idea of a
Nash equilibrium in 1830' (Binmore in Nash, 1996, p. xii).
This bit of wishful thinking has been refuted by Robert
Leonard (1994a).
At the end of the twentieth century, this quest to doctor the
record with regard to Nash and his equilibrium has attained
the status of a public relations campaign with the publication
of a biography of Nash (Nasar, 1998) that became a bestseller
(soon to be a major motion picture directed by Ron Howard and
starring Russell Crowe! Happy Days metts Gladiator! The
possibilities for revisionism are mind-boggling...) and a
commissioned survey in the Journal of Economics Literature
(Myerson, 1999). Although this is not a treatise on the
contemporary sociology of the economics profession, a small
caveat needs to be inserted here about this unusual effusion
of infotainment concerning what must seem, to even the most
avid follower of economics, a topic of rather arid compass
appealing to only the most limited circle of cognoscenti.
Incongruity turns into downright incredulity when one learns
that John Nash refused to cooperate in any way with his
biographer; and that the commissioned JEL survey was never
vetted by any historian familiar with the relevant events,
and consequently the only 'history' to grace the text appears
as a word in its title. The reader should approach these texts
forewarned that John Nash and his equilibrium, through no effort
of his own, have become the object of a vast ceremonial
purification exercise.
Nasar, a journalist, admits that she was tipped off that there
would be a juicy story here before Nash became newsworthy; only
later was he awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994
jointly with John Harsanyii and Reinhard Selton. She was recruited
as the public face of an extensive campaign of spin doctoring
engineered behind the scenes by a few key figures, primarily
because awarding the prize to Nash itself threatened to pry open
a whole pallet of Pandora's boxes: problems ranging from the
potential embarrassment of an award of a Nobel for the formalization
of rationality to a mentally ill individual, to problems of
justifying the Nash equilibrium as the central concept of choice
of the fin-de-siecle economic orthodoxy in the era of its conceptual
disarray, to a threatened uncovering of the extensive military
involvement in modern orthodox microeconomics, to reopening the
very legitimacy of an economics Nobel situated on a par with the
Nobels for the natural sciences. Nasar does mention each of these
issues but, like most modern journalists, sought to deal with the
seamier side of science by repeating the technical opinions she was
told by her behind-the-scenes informants (citing 'confidential
sources'), and then tarting up the story with lots of titillating
sexual details, shameless appeals to sentimentality, and
irresponsible hyperbole: 'Nash's insights into the dynamics of
human rivalry - his theory of rational conflict and cooperation -
was to become one the most influential ideas of the twentieth
century, transforming the young science of economics the way that
Mendel's ideas of genetic transmission, Darwin's model of natural
selection, and Newton's celestial mechanics reshaped biology and
physics in their day'... Writing serious history of economics is
not easy when boilerplate hyperbole crowds out analysis.
For all its drawbacks, however, Nasar's work is redeemed by her
reporting the best short description of the Nash equilibrium
concept that I have ever read: according to Martin Shubik,
someone who was very familiar with Nash during his Princeton
days, 'You can only understand the Nash equilibrium if you
have met Nash. It's a game and it's played alone'... The
relationship to his 'beautiful mind' is a conundrum best left
for the reader to reconcile."
-- Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a
Cyborg Science. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
--
Try http://csf.colorado.edu/pkt/pktauthors/Vienneau.Robert/Bukharin.html
To solve Linear Programs: .../LPSolver.html
r c A game: .../Keynes.html
v s a Whether strength of body or of mind, or wisdom, or
i m p virtue, are found in proportion to the power or wealth
e a e of a man is a question fit perhaps to be discussed by
n e . slaves in the hearing of their masters, but highly
@ r c m unbecoming to reasonable and free men in search of
d o the truth. -- Rousseau
Mason Clark
> "Some of the most bizarre and outlandish statements about the
> history of economics have recently been made about the role and
> accomplishments of the Nash equilibrium concept in game theory.
I wonder if someone here would be so kind as to supply us with
a one-page description of Nash's contribution?
Mason C
Robert Vienneau
mas...@ix.netcom.DELETEcom wrote:
Game Theory provides a formal treatment of well-specified
situations in which the outcome depends on the choices of
several agents who may have conflicting interests.
Abstractly, a player chooses a strategy, where a strategy
specifies the player's move in every situation that may arise
in the game. For example, a strategy for white in chess specifies,
roughly white's move for every board configuration in which
it is his turn. This example is rough because white's play
will prevent certain configurations from arising, and his
strategy need not provide a move for those unreachable
configurations. A game tree is a useful representation for
a game in extensive form. I think this definition of a
strategy elides important issues of algorithms and
computational complexity.
A game in normal form lists the players, the strategies for each
player, and the expected payoffs to each player for each combination
of strategies (the payoff matrix). Table 1 gives an example for what
may be the most famous game designed by game theorists. The first
entry in each ordered pair is the payoff to player A when A plays
the strategy indicated by the row label and B plays the strategy
indicated by the column label. The second entry shows the payoff
to player B.
TABLE 1: A PRISONER'S DILEMMA
PLAYER B
STRATEGY Defect Cooperate
Defect (-1, 2) (1/2, 1 )
PLAYER A Cooperate (0, 1/2) (1, -1)
Suppose the payoffs, in each entry in the payoff matrix, summed over
all players to zero. Then the game is the well-known zero sum
game.
Consider simple two-person zero-sum games like "Odds and Evens"
or "Rock, Scissors, Paper". The best strategy is not to play the
same simple strategy over and over, but to randomly mix strategies.
This is an interesting insight from game theory - that randomness
in economics can come from optimal choices even in games with
completely deterministic rules. The probabilities that the players
should choose depend on the payoff matrix. One can formulate a
Linear Program for each player to solve for these probabilities.
Each player assumes that the other player chooses his probabilities
to minimize the other player's loss, given the first player's
probabilities. A minimax problem arises. The neat thing about
the two Linear Programs is that they are dual problems. Although
von Neumann helped develop Linear Program, vN and Morgenstern
don't point out this connection. However, both vN's paper on
activity analysis and vN and M's book used a fixed point theorem
in the proof of the most important relevant theorems.
How to extend the concept of a solution to more than two players,
or to non-constant sum games, is an interesting question. vN and M
introduced "fictional players", so to speak, to make the general
game like a two-person zero-sum game. A dummy player with one
strategy can absorb the losses and winnings in a non-zero sum
game. Thus, the game, with this dummy appended, becomes a zero-sum
game. The multiplayer game can be thought of as a two player game
between a winning coalition and the remaining players, thus
becoming equivalent to a two-person game. vN and M emphasize that
how the players in a coalition will split up their winnings is
indeterminate, in general. Threats of players to leave a coalition
and join the other side, though, impose constraints on the range
of variability in the set of solution imputations. Notice vN and
M assume both that the players can discuss how to share winnings
beforehand and that agreements are enforcable by some external
institution.
John Forbes Nash extended the two-person zero-sum solution in
another manner. He defined the Nash equilibrium. In a Nash
equilibrium each player's mixed strategy yields that player the
maximum payoff, given that all other players are choosing their
optimal strategy by the same rule. A Nash equilibrium is not
necessarily unique for a given game. Nash also redefined vN and
M's approach to be applied to cooperative games. The Nash
equilibrium is said to apply to non-cooperative games.
Lots of questions arose from this work. How can the players
decide on which Nash equilibria to choose? Can this indeterminacy
be narrowed? Researchers have proposed a whole slew of
refinements and variations - subgame perfect equilibria, trembling
hand equilibria, etc. - the details of which I forget. This looks
like a different approach to economics than Walrasian General
Equilibrium theory. Are they related? Well, the proofs of
the existence of Arrow-Debreu equilibria grew out of the
mathematics of game theory. Furthermore, the equivalence
principle, which M. never accepted, states that game theoretic
solutions will approach Arrow-Debreu equilibria as the number
of players increases.
It seems many mathematicians and economists have decided that,
in practice, one can usually not set up the game and solve it.
Nevertheless, game theory provides a language to talk about such
situations. Discussions in this language have dissected
"rationality" until, perhaps, the concept has fallen apart. You
can view Survivor or the Weakest Link as laboratories to test game
theory. In fact, experimental economics grew up with game theory,
including experiments in which the players are computer code.
Mason Clark
Thank you very much, Robert. I was hoping you would help us.
Mason C
Christopher Auld
An essay which could be titled "random things I know
about game theory, with some reference to John Nash."
Much of it, however, is better than Bob's usual fare.
But some glaring mistakes should be noted, most notably
and strangely:
> TABLE 1: A PRISONER'S DILEMMA
>
> PLAYER B
> STRATEGY Defect Cooperate
> Defect (-1, 2) (1/2, 1 )
> PLAYER A Cooperate (0, 1/2) (1, -1)
... this isn't a prisoners' dilemna (A's dominant strategy
is to cooperate, for one thing!) Here's a PD:
PLAYER B
STRATEGY Defect Cooperate
Defect (-1,-1) (3, -2)
PLAYER A Cooperate (-2, 3) (2, 2)
Regardless of what one's opponent is doing, "defect" is the
best play. Thus the players wind up with (-1,-1) rather than
the Pareto dominating outcome (2,2). (As an aside, notice
that the concept of "efficient" Bob has recently told us is
a useless notion restricted to neoclassical economics arises
here.) This is indeed the most important game in all of
game theory -- much of modern social science from evolutionary
psychology to industrial organization can be roughly captured
as "ah, it's all just a repeated PD." But it's a very poor
vehicle for discussing Nash equilibrium because both players
have dominant strategies.
>Suppose the payoffs, in each entry in the payoff matrix, summed over
>all players to zero. Then the game is the well-known zero sum
>game.
Bob then goes off for several paragraphs on zero sum games
and refers to Nash equilibrium as a solution concept for such
games. Zero-sum games rarely come up in economics and are
of little interest. A reason Nash's concept of equilibrium
is so important is that it applies to non-cooperative games
that are not zero sum.
Bob then obliquely refers to Nash's other major contribution
to game theory, the Nash Bargaining Solution. Nash proposed
an axiomatic solution to the bargaining problems, for instance,
bilateral monopoly. His solution depends deeply on the vNM
axiomatization of expected utility theory. But Bob has an
emotional and negative reaction to expected utility theory
and does not seem to want to admit that von Neumann had
anything to do with it, perhaps explaining the oversight in
this piece.
>refinements and variations - subgame perfect equilibria, trembling
>hand equilibria, etc. - the details of which I forget. This looks
[...]
>situations. Discussions in this language have dissected
>"rationality" until, perhaps, the concept has fallen apart.
Such pronouncements seem to make Bob happy, but it's worth
noting the context in which these discussions arise. In
dynamic games, particularly dynamic games with incomplete
information, the usual solution concepts based on strong,
technical definitions of "rational" can pose paradoxes.
We can wind up in situations where a player can make himself
better off by playing "irrationally," but then it seems odd
to call such behavior "irrational," which is the sense in
which "the concept has fallen apart" in such cases.
We need to discuss solution concepts for dynamic games to
make sense of this. Consider a famous game in which
a firm decides whether to enter a market which is currently
monopolized. If entry occurs, the monopolist can either
"fight" the entrant by charging low prices or he can
"cooperate" by colluding with the entrant. Without going
into the details of specifying numerical payoffs, in the
interesting case there are two Nash equilibria: the monpolist
fights and entry does not occur, or the monopolist colludes
and entry occurs. But suppose that we imagine what happens
if entry does occur: the monopolist will simply lose money
if he fights, so if entry occurs, he will collude. The
first Nash equilibrium then involves a threat which isn't
credible, and it's ruled out as an equilibrium by the
stronger concept "subgame perfect Nash equilibrium."
Notions of "rationality" for dynamic games incorporate such
ideas, and often require thinking about how players should
deal with uncertainty.
The most famous example of a game in which these notions of
"rational" can be argued to be paradoxical is called the
"centipede game." A quick google confirms that anyone
interested can find numerous discussions on the web, saving
me trying to represent the game tree in ASCII. The basic
problem is that that which keeps a "rational" player playing
the equilibrium is his idea of what happens outside of
equilibrium play, but "rational" players cannot consider
what happens when "rational" play doesn't occur. One
manner in which the paradox manifests itself mathematically
is that we can wind up in situations in which an agent is
supposed to Bayesian update beliefs after an event with
probability zero has occurred.
These puzzles with "rationality" in dynamic games are
interesting. However, contrary to Bob's ideas, they are
largely unrelated to the broader literaure on rational
choice theory. For that matter, they do not even imply
that strong notions of rationality are not useful in
thinking about dynamic games of incomplete information.
--
Chris Auld
Department of Economics
University of Calgary
au...@ucalgary.ca
Mason Clark
>Robert Vienneau <rv...@see.sig.com> wrote:
>
>An essay which could be titled "random things I know
>about game theory, with some reference to John Nash."
Chris, please be so kind as to give us a one-page
explanation of Nash's contribution, sans the ad-hominem that
makes your last post useless if not wholly unreadable.
Mason C
Christopher Auld
>Chris, please be so kind as to give us a one-page
>explanation of Nash's contribution, sans the ad-hominem that
>makes your last post useless if not wholly unreadable.
Mason, there is nothing in what I wrote which is
ad hominem (an ad hominem argument is an argument
against the man: My opinion that much of what Bob
wrote is off topic and/or mistaken is not ad hominem.)
And no, I will not write a one-page summary of Nash's
contributions to game theory. If you would like to
know more, you will have to actually spend the effort
required to learn some basic game theory. (Warning:
This may require opening economics textbooks.) I may
have been more inclined to attempt to write such a
one-page summary for folks without the required
background if the requester wasn't prone to ad hominem
content-free posts such as
>An asinine collection of questions. Any rational recipient would
>giggle at the attempted humor and hang up.
susupply
"Mason Clark" <mas...@ix.netcom.com> wrote in message
news:7h187ukd305120tf5...@4ax.com...
> Chris, please be so kind as to give us a one-page
> explanation of Nash's contribution, sans the ad-hominem that
> makes your last post useless if not wholly unreadable.
But Mason, you've already thanked Robert for helping you to understand
Nash's contributions, so why don't you favor us with a summary of what you
have learned from that source?
Patrick
Robert Vienneau
> The first
> entry in each ordered pair is the payoff to player A when A plays
> the strategy indicated by the row label and B plays the strategy
> indicated by the column label. The second entry shows the payoff
> to player B.
>
> TABLE 1: A PRISONER'S DILEMMA
>
> PLAYER B
> STRATEGY Defect Cooperate
> Defect (-1, 2) (1/2, 1 )
> PLAYER A Cooperate (0, 1/2) (1, -1)
Should be:
TABLE 1': A PRISONER'S DILEMMA
PLAYER B
STRATEGY Defect Cooperate
PLAYER A Defect (0, 1/2) (1, -1)
Cooperate (-1, 2) (1/2, 1)
Labels and the order of rows are irrelevant. Both tables show
the same game, a prisoner's dilemma. In fact, this seems to
have been the first prisoner's dilemma ever formulated.
It was first formulated to experimentally demonstrate people
don't choose Nash equilibria. (Mirowski 2002)
"...Apparently one of the earliest thorny issues prompted
by the collaboration (as opposed to von Neumann's lone
elaboration of mathematical concepts) was the attitude to
the neoclassical doctrine of value as individual 'utility'.
A 'logic of desire', a formalism 'mainly concerned with
quasi-psychological or even logistical concepts like
"decisions", "information", "plans"', and so forth,
would seem to be precisely what the neoclassicals thought
they had already advocated and brought to a fevered pitch
of perfection; but this presumption was what both members
of the duo rejected. I believe there subsisted a tension
between von Neumann and Morgenstern over the reasons that
each respectively thought 'utility' was untenable...; but
since Morgenstern deferred to the great mathematician in
all things, this is difficult to sort out.
In any event, it seems that Morgenstern finally convinced
von Neumann that they must proceed tactically by means of
the concillatory move of phrasing the payoffs in terms of
an entity called 'utility', but one that von Neumann would
demonstrate was cardinal - in other words, for all practical
purposes indistinguishable from money - so long as one
remained committed to applications of the expectation
operator of the probability calculus to combinations of
strategies and payoffs. It went without saying that the
one major contribution of the 1928 theory of games that
hinged on precisely this construct - the insistence upon
the intrinsically probabilistic character of play - had
to be retained in the refurbished research program. This,
therefore, is the meaning of the curiously inverted comment
in the final text that 'We have practically defined
numerical utility as being that thing for which the
calculus of mathematical expectation is appropriate'...
In the mind of Morgenstern, this constituted an attack on
the fractious discussion in the 1930s and 1940s of the
nature and significance of interdependence in neoclassical
demand theory...: 'In the essay more remarks are going
to be made about the measurability of utility. It turns out
that one can easily make genuine suppositions of
complimentarity (completely reasonable and possible
suppositions) by which the whole indifference curve analysis
becomes untenable. Instead of this the preferences of the
individual are partially ordered sets' (August 11, 1941,
OMDU). This became known subsequently as the axiomatization
of von Neumann-Morgenstern expected utility, the formal
derivation of which was added as an appendix to the second
edition of Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (TGEB)
in 1946..., although the outline of the proof was
constructed in 1942. (April 14, 1942, OMDU).
Because 'von Neumann-Morgenstern expected utility' was the
one concept in the book that many in the economics profession
latched onto with alacrity in the period immediately following
the publication of TGEB, it is important to try and gain
some perspective on its place in von Neumann's oeuvre. It
must be said that he had no objections to the idea there
was some sort of individual ordering of personal preference;
as we suggested earlier in the chapter, it resonated in a
low-key manner with his methodogically individualist
proclivities. Moreover, he also was moderately favorably
inclined toward the use of extrema in identifying rest
points over preferences; selfishness, as he said, was a law
of nature. Yet, arrayed against these motivations were
other, rather more compelling reasons NOT to accept utility
as any sort of reasonable characterization of psychology.
First, as we have noted, he regarded the mathematics of
utility as a pale and inadequate imitation of classical
mechanics, verging on obsolescence. He had repeatedly
hinted throughout his writings that entropy, and not
energy, held the key to a modern representation of the
processing of information. Second, the text of TGEB insists
that it will have no truck with the subjectivist theory of
probability, but will remain firmly committed to the
frequentist interpretation... This merely reiterated a
position that von Neumann advocated throughout his career
that probabilities were ontic, and not epistemic. Third,
the text explicitly wears its heart on its sleeve, in the
sense that the word 'utility' is treated as just a placeholder
for 'money', something transferrable, numerical, and
fungible in that everyone is presumed to want in unlimited
amounts. Because payoffs are effectively denominated in its
currency as part of the rules, and in magnitudes independent
of play, people are presumed to know what they are getting
as outcomes for each move and countermove before the pieces
hit the board; pace Morgenstern, that aspect is never
allowed to become a matter of interpretation. Whereas the
theory of games was indeed intended to make some stabs in
the direction of a logic of strategy, the theory of utility
was in no way regarded as a necessary or credible component
of that project. Fourth, there was the contemporary
'pragmatist' riposte that act 'as if' they had utility
functions, even though this was not a serious theory of
psychology; what is interesting about von Neumann is that he
was less and less inclined to make these sorts of arguments
as time went on. As we shall observe repeatedly in subsequent
chapters, the wizard of computation betrayed no inclination
to privilege the Turing Test or to simulate rational behavior
in humans; rather, his quest was for a formal theory of
rationality independent of human psychology. This distinction
only grew more dominant in phase three of his research
trajectory. Fifth, and most crucially, the final phase of
von Neumann's career, from 1943 until his death in 1957, was
heavily explicitly occupied with the study of the brain and
the formalization of rational calculation via the
instrumentatily of the computer. At no time in this period
did von Neumann return to 'utility' in order to complement,
illustrate, or inform those objectives. Utility theory
simply dropped from sight."
-- Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams. CUP, 2002.
I agree with Mirowski's reading of the role of utility in
TGEB. I'm previously on record here in noting the
anti-neoclassical nature of vN and M. I've noted the
dearth of applications in this book long before reading
Mirowski on the subject. I've also always been modest
about any claims to fully understand game theory.
Poor Chris Auld.
Mason Clark
Patrick, Robert wrote a summary. Surely you don't require
a summary of the summary? Chris went to great length to
criticize Robert rather than offer his own explanation. I hoped
he could be induced to do better. No such luck, it seems.
Mason C
Christopher Auld
>Patrick, Robert wrote a summary. Surely you don't require
>a summary of the summary? Chris went to great length to
>criticize Robert rather than offer his own explanation.
Well, when you put it that way! Imagine criticizing
something written on Usenet! What's the world coming
to?
Tell you what, Mason. Deja says you've posted 2,120
times to this newsgroup. If you can show me one post
in all those in which you say something substantive
about economists which isn't derogatory, I'll write a
one page summary of John Nash's contributions to game
theory.
--
Christopher Auld
>It was first formulated to experimentally demonstrate people
>don't choose Nash equilibria. (Mirowski 2002)
This is an interesting contention. Perhaps Bob could
supply the relevant quote.
>I agree with Mirowski's reading of the role of utility in
>TGEB. I'm previously on record here in noting the
>anti-neoclassical nature of vN and M. I've noted the
>dearth of applications in this book long before reading
>Mirowski on the subject. I've also always been modest
>about any claims to fully understand game theory.
>
>Poor Chris Auld.
All right I'll bite: Exactly what point do you think
you're winning here, Bob? And could I ask you to please,
please read the Colander paper you so kindly brought
to our attention again? Please note, as usual, your
use of the word "neoclassical" in exactly the manner
he so carefully annihilates. Thanks.
Grinch
wrote:
>Mason Clark <mas...@ix.netcom.DELETEcom> wrote:
>
>>Patrick, Robert wrote a summary. Surely you don't require
>>a summary of the summary? Chris went to great length to
>>criticize Robert rather than offer his own explanation.
>
>Well, when you put it that way! Imagine criticizing
>something written on Usenet! What's the world coming
>to?
>
>Tell you what, Mason. Deja says you've posted 2,120
>times to this newsgroup. If you can show me one post
>in all those in which you say something substantive
>about economists which isn't derogatory, I'll write a
>one page summary of John Nash's contributions to game
>theory.
That's a challenge I want to see taken up!
One out of 2,120 .... he *might* be able to do that, and I'd like to
see the summary.
c...@bluemouth.localdomain.net
> On 19 Feb 2002 19:24:58 -0700, au...@acs.ucalgary.ca (Christopher Auld)
> wrote:
>
> >Mason Clark <mas...@ix.netcom.DELETEcom> wrote:
> >
...<snip>...
> >Tell you what, Mason. Deja says you've posted 2,120
> >times to this newsgroup. If you can show me one post
> >in all those in which you say something substantive
> >about economists which isn't derogatory, I'll write a
> >one page summary of John Nash's contributions to game
> >theory.
>
> That's a challenge I want to see taken up!
>
> One out of 2,120 .... he *might* be able to do that, and I'd like to
> see the summary.
Didn't Mason post something one time about how you give a particular
group an economic boost by giving them a sort of monopoly or advantage
in some line of work and Grinch said Mason was exactly right and gave the
example of Native Americans being allowed to have gambling on their
reservations or something like that?
--
Replace ragwind.localdomain with rahul for a working email address
susupply
> >But Mason, you've already thanked Robert for helping you to understand
> >Nash's contributions, so why don't you favor us with a summary of what
you
> >have learned from that source?
> >
> >Patrick
> >
> Patrick, Robert wrote a summary. Surely you don't require
> a summary of the summary? Chris went to great length to
> criticize Robert rather than offer his own explanation. I hoped
> he could be induced to do better. No such luck, it seems.
>
> Mason C
Mason, I hoped you could be induced to do better. No such luck, it seems.
Patrick
Robert Vienneau
(Christopher Auld) wrote:
> Robert Vienneau <rv...@see.sig.com> wrote:
> >It was first formulated to experimentally demonstrate people
> >don't choose Nash equilibria. (Mirowski 2002)
> This is an interesting contention. Perhaps Bob could
> supply the relevant quote.
Perhaps Bob will, whomever he may be.
Mason Clark
>> >Tell you what, Mason. Deja says you've posted 2,120
>> >times to this newsgroup. If you can show me one post
>> >in all those in which you say something substantive
>> >about economists which isn't derogatory, I'll write a
>> >one page summary of John Nash's contributions to game
>> >theory.
Oh, must have been Chris Auld.
>>
>> That's a challenge I want to see taken up!
Me too. But why the qualifier, "substantive"? An out?
If my web page quotes Vickrey, does that count?
If I defended James Galbraith from calumny, does that count?
If I recommended Robert Eisner and Robert Heilbroner, does that count?
If I recommended Steve Keen's book, "Debunking Economics" does that count?
Or were those not "substantive"?
Or, in your (whose?) mind do they not qualify as "economists"?
---------------------------------------------------
Mason A. Clark
http://masonc.home.netcom.com
political-social-psychological Economics
Ronald Reagan's amazing insight in economics
Complete book: The Healing Wisdom of Dr.P.P.Quimby
Complete book: Get Rich in Small Business
---------------------------------------------------
Best advise: do NOT read economics textbooks!
They will poison your mind with descriptions of
a world that does not exist.
-------I am not a Republican------
Christopher Auld
>>> >Tell you what, Mason. Deja says you've posted 2,120
>>> >times to this newsgroup. If you can show me one post
>>> >in all those in which you say something substantive
>>> >about economists which isn't derogatory, I'll write a
>>> >one page summary of John Nash's contributions to game
>>> >theory.
>If my web page quotes Vickrey, does that count?
>If I defended James Galbraith from calumny, does that count?
>If I recommended Robert Eisner and Robert Heilbroner, does that count?
No, no, and no.
>If I recommended Steve Keen's book, "Debunking Economics" does that count?
Good one!
>Or, in your (whose?) mind do they not qualify as "economists"?
I meant a comment about economists in general that isn't
negative (you know, like the opposite of what appears in
half of the thousands of posts you've so kindly shared
with the group). A few quotes from specific economists
don't count, particularly when they appear to be mostly
negative comments about other economists. Guess that I
won't have to waste my time writing that summary.
Christopher Auld
>(Christopher Auld) wrote:
>> >It was first formulated to experimentally demonstrate people
>> >don't choose Nash equilibria. (Mirowski 2002)
>
>> This is an interesting contention. Perhaps Bob could
>> supply the relevant quote.
>
>Perhaps Bob will, whomever he may be.
Oh my! You mean I'm referring to Mr. Vienneau by
an inappropriate title? How rude. It could only
be ruder if I had been specifically told that the
title was incorrect and asked politely to use the
correct one. Imagine how childish it would be to
refuse such a request.
Now, this would seem to be a diversion from
supplying the relevant quote from Mirowski. I
rather suspect that `the prisoners' dilemna was
invented to show people don't play Nash equilibria'
is a misinterpretation.
Mason Clark
>
>I meant a comment about economists in general that isn't
>negative
Sorry, I'm not capable of such cupidity. *in general*
Mason C
Steve Conover
>Mason Clark <mas...@ix.netcom.DELETEcom> wrote:
>
>>If my web page quotes Vickrey, does that count?
>>If I defended James Galbraith from calumny, does that count?
>>If I recommended Robert Eisner and Robert Heilbroner, does that count?
>
>No, no, and no.
> [snip]
>>Or, in your (whose?) mind do they not qualify as "economists"?
>
>I meant a comment about economists in general that isn't
>negative (you know, like the opposite of what appears in
>half of the thousands of posts you've so kindly shared
>with the group). A few quotes from specific economists
>don't count, particularly when they appear to be mostly
>negative comments about other economists. Guess that I
>won't have to waste my time writing that summary.
Long ago, most of us shot an arrow into the wall. Since then, we
have separated into two groups:
1. Those who have spent their time carefully painting a bright
red bullseye around the spot where the arrow went in.
2. Those who have spent their time assessing their accuracy, and
when appropriate, removing the arrow and taking another shot.
Those in category 1 are easily identifiable. Whom they
consistently defend (those with similar political views), and
whom they don't (anyone who espouses an opposing political view
-- frequently other category 1 members), is a good clue.
These guidelines have helped me manage my killfile list. FWIW.
--Steve
David Lloyd-Jones
Bob Vienneau wrote:
>
> Perhaps Bob will, whomever he may be.
>
"Whomever"??!
-dlj.
David Lloyd-Jones
I supposed to think of him as an RV? -- original post, and curiously it's
one that Chris has acquiesced in. RV posted as though Von Neuman and
Morgenstern had been economists right back into the 1930's, and theory of
games had been an accepted part of economics for almost as long.
This is just false. Von Neuman and Morgenstern were certainly major league
public intellectuals (a term that has only become fashionable in the last 18
months or so), and dealing with economics -- or political economy as it was
called in their day -- was certainly part of their role as they saw it
themselves. They were not, however, taken seriously by soi disant economists
as economists.
Theory of games is with great justice dated from the amazing RAND
Corporation class of 1943~45, of which I don't think (somebody correct me if
I'm wrong) either Von Neuman or Morgenstern were members. Kenneth Arrow was
one of the stars, but I don't think he became an economist until a good deal
later. Anatol Rapoport was another, and to this day I think he's entitled to
both a Nobel Peace Prize (for "Debates, Games and Negotiations, [no doubt
I've mixed up the order]" which I think got us through the cold war without
nuking each other) and in economics for every other damn thing he's done.
Still, he is not to this day accepted as a mainstream economist. (I imagine
Axelrod will eventually collect that particular Nobel, simply because he's
young enough to probably be the last one standing.)
Fogel's "Games Theory and Economics" was as far as I know the first text to
be taken seriously as economics by academic economists, i.e. the people who
teach economics, as opposed to the people who build H-bombs or commune with
Khruschev's son-in-law in Vienna. (These latter two were the authors of
"TGEB," as "Bob" so familiar calls it.) Google dates Fogel's book as 1991,
though I think of it as being 1987. Perhaps I read it in
freebie-for-the-text-committee form.
Either way, that's a little bit more recent than Vienneau's post painted all
these issues as being. To give him some credit, perhaps he has been taken in
by the universal temptation of people who come late to a field to backdate
their memories.
-dlj.
Robert Vienneau
Lloyd-Jones" <dav...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> It seemed to me that there was one distortion in Bob's -- or Robert's, or
> am
> I supposed to think of him as an RV? -- original post, and curiously it's
> one that Chris has acquiesced in. RV posted as though Von Neuman and
> Morgenstern had been economists right back into the 1930's, and theory of
> games had been an accepted part of economics for almost as long.
Davy is making false statements. I never discussed the lack of
acceptance by economists of game theory or not.
Von Neumann and John Nash were mathematicians. Game theory, until
the late 1970s was dealt with by mathematicians at Princeton,
interdisciplinary groups at RAND, the "peacenik's RAND" at the
University of Michigan, etc. I myself was formally taught two person
zero sum games as an application of Linear Programming. This was in
the early 1980s in an Operations Research class situated in a
math department.
> This is just false. Von Neuman and Morgenstern were certainly major
> league
> public intellectuals..., and dealing with economics -- or political
> economy as it was
> called in their day -- was certainly part of their role as they saw it
> themselves.
Von Neumann was more of a defense intellectual. Morgenstern
was not nearly as broad in his abilities. Morgenstern was an
economist. Marshall pushed the name change from "political
economy" to "economics". This was before vN and M's day.
> They were not, however, taken seriously by soi disant
> economists as economists.
Davy deals with major themes of Mirowski (2002) throughout this
post, but with annoying misstatements. Mirowski's theme is how
neoclassical economists resisted and accomodated Operations
Research, Information Theory, Artificial Intelligence, Systems
Analysis, and C3I. In other words, his book is about some origins
of contemporary mainstream economics in America. The interaction
of Cowles and RAND is an important element in this story.
> Theory of games is with great justice dated from the amazing RAND
> Corporation class of 1943~45, of which I don't think (somebody correct me
> if
> I'm wrong) either Von Neuman or Morgenstern were members.
The first edition of vN and M's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior
is 1944. They were in Princeton at the time.
"John Williams, and implicitly John von Neumann, had stocked the
Military Evaluation Section at RAND with game theorists in order
to give game theory a run for its money, and that is just what
happened. Olaf Helmer convened a Conference on the Applications
of Game Theory to Tactics ar Chicago in March 1949; already by
February 1949 Helmer could provide Oskar Morgenstern with twenty
seven separate research memorando on game theory written at
RAND about which he had been previously unaware."
-- Mirowski (2002)
Von Neumann gave lectures on game theory to RAND.
By the early 1960s, the analysts at RAND had rejected game
theory as not being particularly useful in solving practical
problems.
> Kenneth Arrow
> was
> one of the stars, but I don't think he became an economist until a good
> deal
> later.
Arrow's PhD from Columbia (1951) is in economics. He studied under
Hotelling, for instance. He was a research associate for the Cowles
Commission from 1947 on. Arrow was and is an economist.
I think Arrow's RAND research was in the 1950s - anyway, later than 1945.
> Anatol Rapoport was another, and to this day I think he's entitled
> to
> both a Nobel Peace Prize (for "Debates, Games and Negotiations, [no doubt
> I've mixed up the order]" which I think got us through the cold war
> without
> nuking each other) and in economics for every other damn thing he's done.
> Still, he is not to this day accepted as a mainstream economist. (I
> imagine
> Axelrod will eventually collect that particular Nobel, simply because
> he's
> young enough to probably be the last one standing.)
Anatol Rapoport was originally a mathematical biologist. His PhD,
from Chicago in 1941, is in mathematics. He was an assistant
professor of mathematical biology. He was at Michigan from 1955
to 1969, and he worked with Kenneth Boulding.
> Fogel's "Games Theory and Economics" was as far as I know the first text
> to
> be taken seriously as economics by academic economists, i.e. the people
> who
> teach economics, as opposed to the people who build H-bombs or commune
> with
> Khruschev's son-in-law in Vienna. (These latter two were the authors of
> "TGEB," as "Bob" so familiar calls it.)
It's the above sort of statements that makes me wonder whether Davy
is trolling.
Who was the audience for Luce and Raiffa's Games and Decisions (1957)?
Christopher Auld
>This is just false. Von Neuman and Morgenstern were certainly major league
>public intellectuals (a term that has only become fashionable in the last 18
>months or so), and dealing with economics -- or political economy as it was
>called in their day -- was certainly part of their role as they saw it
>themselves. They were not, however, taken seriously by soi disant economists
>as economists.
David, what is your source for this? von Neumann was a
mathematician, but Morgenstern was an economist. I am
not familiar with any of his work before TGEB, but he
was respected enough to land a position at Princeton
after the Nazis tossed him out.
>Fogel's "Games Theory and Economics" was as far as I know the first text to
>be taken seriously as economics by academic economists, i.e. the people who
>teach economics, as opposed to the people who build H-bombs or commune with
>Khruschev's son-in-law in Vienna. (These latter two were the authors of
>"TGEB," as "Bob" so familiar calls it.) Google dates Fogel's book as 1991,
>though I think of it as being 1987. Perhaps I read it in
>freebie-for-the-text-committee form.
I'm not sure I understand the claim here, so to be clear: The
first text on game theory "to be taken seriously by academic
economists" was published in 1987? If that is indeed the
claim, it's very, very mistaken.
Christopher Auld
>"David Lloyd-Jones" <dav...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
>Von Neumann and John Nash were mathematicians. Game theory, until
>the late 1970s was dealt with by mathematicians at Princeton,
>interdisciplinary groups at RAND, the "peacenik's RAND" at the
>University of Michigan, etc.
Game theory has been a major component of economics, biology,
and mathematics for many decades. It was "dealt with" at
many places.
>The first edition of vN and M's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior
>is 1944. They were in Princeton at the time.
Further, the first manuscript was 1941. Although it was
called Theory of Games and Rational Behavior at that time.
>Who was the audience for Luce and Raiffa's Games and Decisions (1957)?
Bob and I agree on something. Everyone, remain calm
and move in an orderly fashion towards the bomb shelters.
Christopher Auld
>"Whomever"??!
"'Whom are you?' said he, for he had been to night school."
-- George Ade
David Lloyd-Jones
"Robert Vienneau" <rv...@see.sig.com> just makes stuff up out of thin air.
> Von Neumann was more of a defense intellectual.
What's your theory, that defense is not a public concern?
> Morgenstern
> was not nearly as broad in his abilities.
Morgenstern was the main initiator on the American side of the establishment
of the International Institute for Systems Analysis in Vienna -- one of the
cold war's most important hives of undercover detente. This is purely
political work on Morgenstern's side -- perhaps as his name would suggest,
playing Venus to Von Neuman's Mars.
> Morgenstern was an
> economist. Marshall pushed the name change from "political
> economy" to "economics". This was before vN and M's day.
What's you're theory Bobby, that "poitical economy" vanished from people's
vocabulary in the 19th century? Wrong. the victory of the etiolated notion
"economics" is purely post WWII.
> > They were not, however, taken seriously by soi disant
> > economists as economists.
>
> Davy deals with major themes of Mirowski (2002) throughout this
> post, but with annoying misstatements. Mirowski's theme is how
> neoclassical economists resisted and accomodated Operations
> Research, Information Theory, Artificial Intelligence, Systems
> Analysis, and C3I. In other words, his book is about some origins
> of contemporary mainstream economics in America. The interaction
> of Cowles and RAND is an important element in this story.
I was not dealing with Mirowski at all, but with my own experiences with a
number of these people.
> > Theory of games is with great justice dated from the amazing RAND
> > Corporation class of 1943~45, of which I don't think (somebody correct
me
> > if
> > I'm wrong) either Von Neuman or Morgenstern were members.
>
> The first edition of vN and M's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior
> is 1944. They were in Princeton at the time.
My point exactly. Thank you for the confirmation.
> "John Williams, and implicitly John von Neumann, had stocked the
> Military Evaluation Section at RAND with game theorists in order
> to give game theory a run for its money, and that is just what
> happened. Olaf Helmer convened a Conference on the Applications
> of Game Theory to Tactics ar Chicago in March 1949; already by
> February 1949 Helmer could provide Oskar Morgenstern with twenty
> seven separate research memorando on game theory written at
> RAND about which he had been previously unaware."
> -- Mirowski (2002)
>
> Von Neumann gave lectures on game theory to RAND.
>
> By the early 1960s, the analysts at RAND had rejected game
> theory as not being particularly useful in solving practical
> problems.
>
> > Kenneth Arrow
> > was
> > one of the stars, but I don't think he became an economist until a good
> > deal
> > later.
>
> Arrow's PhD from Columbia (1951) is in economics. He studied under
> Hotelling, for instance. He was a research associate for the Cowles
> Commission from 1947 on. Arrow was and is an economist.
Thank you for confirming that Arrow was not yet an economist when he wa at
RAND during the War.
> I think Arrow's RAND research was in the 1950s - anyway, later than 1945.
>
> > Anatol Rapoport was another, and to this day I think he's entitled
> > to
> > both a Nobel Peace Prize (for "Debates, Games and Negotiations, [no
doubt
> > I've mixed up the order]" which I think got us through the cold war
> > without
> > nuking each other) and in economics for every other damn thing he's
done.
> > Still, he is not to this day accepted as a mainstream economist. (I
> > imagine
> > Axelrod will eventually collect that particular Nobel, simply because
> > he's
> > young enough to probably be the last one standing.)
>
> Anatol Rapoport was originally a mathematical biologist.
Horseshit. Rapoport invented mathematical biology and mathematical
psychology, neither of them great successes, while he was at RAND -- where
he was a specialist in air force logistics.
> His PhD,
> from Chicago in 1941, is in mathematics. He was an assistant
> professor of mathematical biology. He was at Michigan from 1955
> to 1969, and he worked with Kenneth Boulding.
>
> > Fogel's "Games Theory and Economics" was as far as I know the first text
> > to
> > be taken seriously as economics by academic economists, i.e. the people
> > who
> > teach economics, as opposed to the people who build H-bombs or commune
> > with
> > Khruschev's son-in-law in Vienna. (These latter two were the authors of
> > "TGEB," as "Bob" so familiar calls it.)
>
> It's the above sort of statements that makes me wonder whether Davy
> is trolling.
>
> Who was the audience for Luce and Raiffa's Games and Decisions (1957)?
Not very many economics, Bobby.
-dlj.
Lewis Mammel
Remember when The New Yorker used to have little bloopers and
quips from the news as column footers? One I remember was of
a politician who said he would support the candidate "whomever
it may be." When asked if he himself would run he replied,
"You'll notice I said 'whomever'." - quipped The New Yorker,
"We tried to overlook it."
Lew Mammel, Jr.
Lewis Mammel
Christopher Auld wrote:
> Mason, there is nothing in what I wrote which is
> ad hominem (an ad hominem argument is an argument
> against the man: My opinion that much of what Bob
> wrote is off topic and/or mistaken is not ad hominem.)
But "against the man" would be "anti hominem" wouldn't it?
I know it's a lost cause, but since you made such a point
of it, I'll go once more into the breech.
"ad hominem" means "to the man" which means, or meant, an
appeal to the emotions or prejudices of the addressee of
an argument, e.g. "Do you sincerely want to be rich?" or
"Have you no compassion for the poor?"
The concept doesn't require a format where the arguer has
an opponent, as in a debate. If this is the case, though,
an obvious ad hominem appeal to the audience of the
debate is "don't believe my opponent, he's an idiot."
and this apparently devolves to "you're an idiot" in a
direct argument, which is misunderstood as "against
the man" or "ad hominem" (sic)
Lew Mammel, Jr.
Mason Clark
I wouldn't want to bloviate about this, but maybe you're
both right:
ad ho·mi·nem (ad hom_uh nuhm, -nem•) adj.
1. appealing to one's prejudice, emotions, or special interests
rather than to one's intellect or reason.
2. attacking an opponent's character rather than answering an
argument.
adv.
3. in an ad hominem manner.
[< L: lit., to the man]
Copy-and-paste from my computer's Webster.
Mason
David Lloyd-Jones
"Christopher Auld" <au...@acs.ucalgary.ca> wrote in message
news:a539qg$4k...@acs1.acs.ucalgary.ca...
> David Lloyd-Jones <dav...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
>
> >This is just false. Von Neuman and Morgenstern were certainly major
league
> >public intellectuals (a term that has only become fashionable in the last
18
> >months or so), and dealing with economics -- or political economy as it
was
> >called in their day -- was certainly part of their role as they saw it
> >themselves. They were not, however, taken seriously by soi disant
economists
> >as economists.
>
> David, what is your source for this? von Neumann was a
> mathematician, but Morgenstern was an economist. I am
> not familiar with any of his work before TGEB, but he
> was respected enough to land a position at Princeton
> after the Nazis tossed him out.
Chris,
I'm not sure what you mean by "What is my source?" It seems to me simply
obvious by inspection. Or does you definition of "as an economist" include
the necessity of having a doctorate in economics and being on an economics
faculty?
> >Fogel's "Games Theory and Economics" was as far as I know the first text
to
> >be taken seriously as economics by academic economists, i.e. the people
who
> >teach economics, as opposed to the people who build H-bombs or commune
with
> >Khruschev's son-in-law in Vienna. (These latter two were the authors of
> >"TGEB," as "Bob" so familiar calls it.) Google dates Fogel's book as
1991,
> >though I think of it as being 1987. Perhaps I read it in
> >freebie-for-the-text-committee form.
>
> I'm not sure I understand the claim here, so to be clear: The
> first text on game theory "to be taken seriously by academic
> economists" was published in 1987? If that is indeed the
> claim, it's very, very mistaken.
No, it was published in 1991. That is indeed the claim, and it rests on
converstaions with Rapoport and Boulding, and on the brick wall I ran into
as the elected student rep on the Economics Faculty Curriculum Committee at
UofT in the late '80's.
Economists today tend to backdate their memories, just as, say,
environmentalists are always magically remembering that they were the first
to make Lomborg's criticisms of environmentalism, and so forth. The fact
remains, however, that the few games-theoretical treatments of economics
around before about 1990 were curiosities and niche occupations. Mainstream
academic economics ignored them.
Today I suppose you can say that microeconomics is simply a branch of game
theory. This, I would guess, is what microeconomists of only 15 years ago
feared. Oddly, I think one might define economics not as the dreary
profession but as the fear-ridden one. Just as microeconomists feared
turning into games theoreticians, so the inane mathematicisation of
macroeconomics is dictated for the most part by macroeconomists' fear of
waking up as sociologists.
Cheers,
-dlj.
David Lloyd-Jones
"Christopher Auld" <au...@acs.ucalgary.ca> wrote
>
> Game theory has been a major component of economics, biology,
> and mathematics for many decades. It was "dealt with" at
> many places.
This is not just true, it's obvious. My point is that until about 1990
academic economists almost universally tried to pretend otherwise.
-dlj.
Christopher Auld
>The concept doesn't require a format where the arguer has
>an opponent, as in a debate. If this is the case, though,
>an obvious ad hominem appeal to the audience of the
>debate is "don't believe my opponent, he's an idiot."
Yes. Now please quote me calling Bob an "idiot"
or similar.
Christopher Auld
>I'm not sure what you mean by "What is my source?" It seems to me simply
>obvious by inspection.
Inspection of what?
> Or does you definition of "as an economist" include
>the necessity of having a doctorate in economics and being on an
>economics faculty?
I don't know what Morgenstern's doctorate is in -- is it
not economics? Was he not in the economics dep't at
Princeton?
I don't actually think either of these conditions is
necessary to be an "economist," although for obvious
reasons most "economists" will satisfy them. However,
I think someone on this group just claimed Ken Arrow
wasn't an economist during WWII because he hadn't
yet completed his doctoral dissertation in economics
at that time.
>> first text on game theory "to be taken seriously by academic
>> economists" was published in 1987? If that is indeed the
>> claim, it's very, very mistaken.
>No, it was published in 1991. That is indeed the claim, and it rests on
>converstaions with Rapoport and Boulding, and on the brick wall I ran into
>as the elected student rep on the Economics Faculty Curriculum Committee at
>UofT in the late '80's.
David, I cannot emphasize enough how mistaken you are. I
think you must have misinterpreted Rapoport et al and
misunderstood the nature of the "brick wall." By the
late eighties game theory had all but entirely taken
over industrial organization and was a central tool
in many other fields, perhaps most notably labor
economics. Signalling, mechanism design, implementability,
information economics, auction theory, principal/agent
models, and many other critical ideas in modern economics
were "taken seriously by academic economists" long before
1990. I am sure Matthewson, Gallini, Winter, Pitchik,
Coyte, Ware and likely many other economists I forgot
or don't know who were at Toronto at roughly this time
would be equally surprised by the claim that their work
wasn't taken seriously.
I am also old enough, at the ripe old age of 32, to be
able to refute the claim from personal experience. My
first exposure to game theory was in 1987, as a
freshman, in my first intro to economics course (niche
ideas not taken seriously tend not to be discussed in
such courses). The first course I took on game theory
specifically was in 1989. There was a shortage of neither
game theory textbooks nor applications in many fields at
this time. Incidentally, I have never even heard of the
Fogel textbook that is alleged to have been the first text
on game theory ever taken seriously by economists.
>Today I suppose you can say that microeconomics is simply a branch of game
>theory.
And this would be overstatement in the other direction.
> This, I would guess, is what microeconomists of only 15 years ago
>feared. Oddly, I think one might define economics not as the dreary
>profession but as the fear-ridden one. Just as microeconomists feared
>turning into games theoreticians, so the inane mathematicisation of
>macroeconomics is dictated for the most part by macroeconomists' fear of
>waking up as sociologists.
David, you have some very funny ideas about what academic
economists think. Well, this is sci.econ after all....
David Lloyd-Jones
"Christopher Auld" <au...@acs.ucalgary.ca> wrote
>
> David, you have some very funny ideas about what academic
> economists think. Well, this is sci.econ after all....
>
Chris,
Assuming that by "funny" you mean odd, I would simply counter that not being
a working economist, I am not forced to bow down to the adacemic Baals.
That you were exposed to game theory in an undergraduate introductory course
in game theory simply shows you went to one of the world's better
universities, which indeed you did, and were therefore at the front of the
wave. If you like I'll move my date for game theory being accepted into
economics as other than a niche item back to 1985.
The fact remains that economics departments in many places were fighting
game theory right up to 1991, and the victory has only become complete in
the 1990's.
Morgenstern, Von Neuman, RAND and so on were extremely rarified curiosities
in 1945 when they were at the peak of their powers, and were on other
planets in the persepctive of all economics departments. (I have the
complete Harvard economics syllabus for 1945 somewhere, and have read it
repeatedly. This one can do in a couple of hours, and there is not a smidgen
of game theory in it -- despite Harvard having spent the war years in bed
with the Office of Naval Research and ONI, Sister Chapels, if not Mother
Church, of game theory.)
Rapoport has never been recognised as an economist, neither at Toronto nor
at Michigan, and this despite the fact that his, and Poundstone's,
Prisoners' Dilemma -- can't anybody get the plural possessive apostrophe in
the right place? -- is probably one of the dozen most major pillars of
modern economics. Boulding was an economist to perhaps a third of "the
profession," but only because he wrote a good deal of policy work that was
inescapably economics. To the majority of the profession he was an outside
agitator. In 1943~45 when Arrow was at RAND, he not only did not have a
doctorate in economics; he was not working on anything which was reconised
by any economics department as economics at the time.... if only because all
ten people who could have taught it were out in Santa Monica with him... :-)
Best wishes,
-dlj.
Robert Vienneau
Lloyd-Jones" <dav...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> "Robert Vienneau" <rv...@see.sig.com> [ silliness deleted ]:
> > Von Neumann was more of a defense intellectual.
> What's your theory, that defense is not a public concern?
My exemplar of a public intellectual tends to be more like
a member of the Partisan Review crowd, a humanist. Somebody
whose worldly activities came to be participating in mostly
secret defense committees, based on technical expertise,
deviates from that image.
> > Morgenstern
> > was not nearly as broad in his abilities.
> Morgenstern was the main initiator on the American side of the
> establishment
> of the International Institute for Systems Analysis in Vienna -- one of
> the
> cold war's most important hives of undercover detente. This is purely
> political work on Morgenstern's side -- perhaps as his name would
> suggest,
> playing Venus to Von Neuman's Mars.
The cold war, economics, and game theory don't come close
to exhausting von Neumann's impact. I don't think Morgenstern ever
did anything on quantum mechanics or mathematical logic, for
example.
> > Morgenstern was an
> > economist. Marshall pushed the name change from "political
> > economy" to "economics". This was before vN and M's day.
> What's you're theory Bobby, that "poitical economy" vanished from
> people's
> vocabulary in the 19th century? Wrong. the victory of the etiolated
> notion
> "economics" is purely post WWII.
It must make Davy happy to say strawpersons are mistaken. vN
and M were not contrasting their notions with American
Institutionalism, for example.
> > > They were not, however, taken seriously by soi disant
> > > economists as economists.
> > Davy deals with major themes of Mirowski (2002) throughout this
> > post, but with annoying misstatements. Mirowski's theme is how
> > neoclassical economists resisted and accomodated Operations
> > Research, Information Theory, Artificial Intelligence, Systems
> > Analysis, and C3I. In other words, his book is about some origins
> > of contemporary mainstream economics in America. The interaction
> > of Cowles and RAND is an important element in this story.
> I was not dealing with Mirowski at all, but with my own experiences with
> a number of these people.
Do I say that Davy was dealing with Mirowski's book? No, I do
not. I say Davy was dealing with Mirowski's themes, e.g., the
resistance of economists to OR. Does Davy contradict me by saying
that he was dealing with his own experiences? No, he does not.
I'm glad to see that we are agreed that vN and M created game theory
in the work leading up to their book (aside from vN's previous work
in the 1920s with a different community) and that vN stocked RAND
with researchers to explore the subject. vN gave lectures to
RAND on game theory in 1945.
> > Who was the audience for Luce and Raiffa's Games and Decisions (1957)?
> Not very many economics...
My question is a question, not a rhetorical statement.
The idea that economists mostly rejected game theory throughout the
1950s, 1960s, and much of the 1970s is not novel to me. Nor to
Mirowski. Nor do I reject this idea.
David Lloyd-Jones
> Lloyd-Jones" <dav...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> > What's your theory, that defense is not a public concern?
> My exemplar of a public intellectual tends to be more like
> a member of the Partisan Review crowd, a humanist. Somebody
> whose worldly activities came to be participating in mostly
> secret defense committees, based on technical expertise,
> deviates from that image.
Bob,
Given that most of the Partisan Review crowd were on the OSS and CIA
payrolls -- generally with paycheques signed by my friend E.J. "Ed"
Applewhite -- over the years in question, I have some trouble with your
distinction.
-dlj.
Paul Walker
news:a56p7c$50pcu$1...@ID-99058.news.dfncis.de:
> "Christopher Auld" <au...@acs.ucalgary.ca> wrote
>> David, you have some very funny ideas about what academic
>> economists think. Well, this is sci.econ after all....
> Chris,
> Assuming that by "funny" you mean odd, I would simply counter that
> not being a working economist, I am not forced to bow down to the
> adacemic Baals.
> That you were exposed to game theory in an undergraduate introductory
> course in game theory simply shows you went to one of the world's
> better universities, which indeed you did, and were therefore at the
> front of the wave. If you like I'll move my date for game theory
> being accepted into economics as other than a niche item back to
> 1985.
> The fact remains that economics departments in many places were
> fighting game theory right up to 1991, and the victory has only
> become complete in the 1990's.
Even we here in little old New Zealand have been teaching GT since the
early to mid 80s.
But GT has been part of econ and other areas basically from the start.
One of the earliest applications of game theory to political science is
L. S. Shapley and M. Shubik with their 1954 paper "A Method for
Evaluating the Distribution of Power in a Committee System". They use
the Shapley value to determine the power of the members of the UN
Security Council. One of the first applications of game theory to
philosophy is R. B. Braithwaite's 1955 book "Theory of Games as a Tool
for the Moral Philosopher". The relationship between Edgeworth's idea of
the contract curve and the core was pointed out in 1959 by Martin Shubik
in his paper "Edgeworth Market Games". Shubik also published his book
"Strategy and Market Structure: Competition, Oligopoly, and the Theory
of Games" in 1959. This was one of the first books to take an explicitly
non-cooperative game theoretic approach to modelling oligopoly. It also
contains an early statement of the Folk Theorem.
In 1961 the first explicit application to evolutionary biology was made
by R. C. Lewontin in the paper "Evolution and the Theory of Games". One
of the first applications of game theory to cost allocation is Martin
Shubik's 1962 paper "Incentives, Decentralized Control,the Assignment of
Joint Costs and Internal Pricing". In this paper Shubik argued that the
Shapley value could be used to provide a means of devising incentive-
compatible cost assignments and internal pricing in a firm with
decentralised decision making. An early use of game theory in insurance
is Karl Borch's 1962 paper "Application of Game Theory to Some Problems
in Automobile Insurance". The article indicates how game theory can be
applied to determine premiums for different classes of insurance, when
required total premium for all classes is given. Borch suggests that the
Shapley value will give reasonable premiums for all classes of risk. In
their 1963 paper "A Limit Theorem on the Core of an Economy" Debreu and
Scarf generalised Edgeworth, in the context of a NTU game, by allowing
an arbitrary number of commodities and an arbitrary but finite number of
types of traders. In 1964 Robert J. Aumann further extended Edgeworth by
assuming that the agents constitute a (non-atomic) continuum in his
paper "Markets with a Continuum of Traders". In a series of three
papers, "Games with Incomplete Information Played by 'Bayesian'
Players", Parts I, II and III, John Harsanyi constructed the theory of
games of incomplete information. This laid the theoretical groundwork
for information economics which has become one of the major themes of
economics. This was in 1967-68.
And so on.
By the 1970s (mainly non-cooperative) GT was racing ahead in economics
and has been standard fare since then.
As to textbooks, Shubik's two volumes "Game Theory in the Social
Sciences: Concepts and Solutions" and "A Game Theoretic Approach to
Political Economy" were published in 82 and 84. The first edition of
Friedman's "Game Theory with Applications to Economics" was published in
86. Moulin's first edition of "Game Theory for the Social Sciences" came
out in 1981. Tashiro Ichiishi published "Game Theory for Economic
Analysis " in 1983.
In short, game theory has been in economics for a long while now.
--
____________________________________________________
Paul Walker p.wa...@econ.canterbury.ac.nz
David Lloyd-Jones
"Paul Walker" <p.wa...@NOT.econ.canterbury.ac.nz> wrote
<much correct stuff snipped>
> In short, game theory has been in economics for a long while now.
But Paul, you confirm my timetable exactly, if anything biasing yourself
more to the 1950's where I say 1940's, and 1990's for developments I am
willing to allow back as far as maybe 1985.
Game theory has been part of economics for a long time. The recognition of
game theory as part of economics by academic economists is very very recent,
and their pretence that they took part in the change from the beginning is
utterly bogus.
Note that Chris Auld gets himself neatly under the wire by saying loudly
that he took game theory as an undergraduate in 1987 -- on my timetable
within months either way..
-dlj.
Christopher Auld
>Game theory has been part of economics for a long time. The recognition of
>game theory as part of economics by academic economists is very very recent,
>and their pretence that they took part in the change from the beginning is
>utterly bogus.
David, how much more evidence do you need that your idea
is mistaken? I agree that game theoretic modelling became
for more prevalent in the mid-seventies -- placing this
event about a decade before your revised date of 1985.
Bob, in typical Vienneavian style, manages to phrase this
as a slur -- economists "rejected" game theory up until
this time, as if the entire mathematical and conceptual
structure of game theory fell from the sky in 1945 and
economists petulantly disregarded it for thirty years.
Actually, the rise of game theoretic applications around
this time followed, and moved hand in hand with, increasing
interest in the new economics of information.
Now, note that your claim is much different than simply
noting that game theory became much more common around
1985, it's that economists were "afraid of being game
theorists" and did not "recognize game theory as economics"
until then. I've already noted that your idea that UofT
rejected whatever suggestions you made as an undergrad
because of some fear or somesuch of game theory is clearly
belied by the large number of well-known game theorists
there at the time. I don't know what you inferred from
whatever the two names you dropped told you, but what
you're saying simply doesn't hold water. I offer, as
one of many examples:
Schotter, A. and G. Schwodiauer (1980) "Economics and
the theory of games: A survey," Journal of Economic
Literature 18:479-527.
This survey predates your revised timeline five years.
It cites hundreds of articles in major mainstream
journals and dozens of textbooks dating back to the
fifties. It also notes (I didn't know this) that
game theory was very popular in the fifties:
By the late 50s the consensus in the profession
was clear: game theory was to be theory for the
small numbers case in economics.
but interest waned in the sixties, reinvigorated by the
aforementioned developments in, amongst other things,
information economics. None of this is at all consistent
with "economists didn't accept game theory (they were
afraid of it!) until 1991, oops 1985!" I think if you
want to continue this discussion you are going to have
to actually present some sort of evidence.
>Note that Chris Auld gets himself neatly under the wire by saying loudly
>that he took game theory as an undergraduate in 1987 -- on my timetable
>within months either way..
David, I first drove a car in 1985. That doesn't mean cars
were invented sometime around December of 1984 (although it
does mean that they couldn't have been invented in 1991).
Christopher Auld
>Rapoport has never been recognised as an economist, neither at Toronto nor
>at Michigan, and this despite the fact that his, and Poundstone's,
>Prisoners' Dilemma -- can't anybody get the plural possessive apostrophe in
>the right place? -- is probably one of the dozen most major pillars of
>modern economics.
1. Rapoport is not, nor has he ever been, an economist. He
does not identify himself as such; he no training in economics;
he never worked in an economics department; he did not choose
economics journals as a primary outlet. Yes, he worked on many
issues of interest to game theoretic economists, but that
doesn't make him an economist for the same reasons as those
economists aren't recognized as mathematical biologists.
2. I had to look up what David means by "Poundstone's Prisoners'
Dilemma." It's a 1992 book by journalist William Poundstone.
The game predates the book by at least 40 years, and one should
not refer to "Poundstone's Prisoners' Dilemma" unless one is
referring to the book and writing on a medium incapable of
producing underlines or equivalent. Rapoport did some
interesting early work on the PD, but he didn't invent it and
it should not be referred to as "Rapoport's PD" either.
>agitator. In 1943~45 when Arrow was at RAND, he not only did not have a
>doctorate in economics; he was not working on anything which was reconised
>by any economics department as economics at the time....
I would imagine not, since he was in the army from 1942 through
1946 and didn't start at RAND until 1948. When he got to RAND his
research focused on social choice theory, which was of course
"recognized as economics" at the time.
Christopher Auld
>> Defect (-1, 2) (1/2, 1 )
>> PLAYER A Cooperate (0, 1/2) (1, -1)
>I made a mistake:
Bob should say "the web page I plagiarized this from made
a mistake." He evidently copied this matrix from
http://econ161.berkeley.edu/Economists/prisoners_dilemma.html
which has the same typographical error. This page
also explains why Bob thinks
>It was first formulated to experimentally demonstrate people
>don't choose Nash equilibria. (Mirowski 2002),
because it comments on experiments on the *iterated*
prisoners' dilemma in which people don't play the
unique Nash equilibrium of the *supergame* (it does
not claim the PD was "invented" for the purpose of
"showing people don't play NE," however, which seems
to be a Vienneavian bit of revisionism). This is
now known to be related to the ideas I brought up
earlier on rationality and backwards induction. Later
experiments on the iterated PD, such as Axelrod's,
do not end after a finite and known number of iterations,
such that cooperation can be obtained in equilibrium.
Generally, however, Nash equilibria are often good
descriptions of actual behavior. See
G. Mailath (1998) "Do People Play Nash Equilibrium?
Lessons From Evolutionary Game Theory," Journal
of Economic Literature, 36:1347-1374.
Lewis Mammel
Right; usage rules. "1." is obviously the original meaning, and matches
the meaning of the Latin phrase. Chris used the phrase "against the man"
which is not a translation of the Latin. The fact that ad != against
is what caught my attention some years ago, and led me to investigate
the matter.
Lew Mammel, Jr.
Lewis Mammel
Christopher Auld wrote:
>
> Lewis Mammel <l.ma...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
> >The concept doesn't require a format where the arguer has
> >an opponent, as in a debate. If this is the case, though,
> >an obvious ad hominem appeal to the audience of the
> >debate is "don't believe my opponent, he's an idiot."
>
> Yes. Now please quote me calling Bob an "idiot"
> or similar.
I suppose this is impossible, since you clearly stated there
was no such thing in your writing. I only meant this as an
hypothetical illustration.
Lew Mammel, Jr.
David Lloyd-Jones
"Christopher Auld" <au...@acs.ucalgary.ca> wrote
>
> 1. Rapoport is not, nor has he ever been, an economist.
Your single example of yourself does not prove my point, but it sure
strengthens it. Of course Rapoport is an economist, among many other things.
> 2. I had to look up what David means by "Poundstone's Prisoners'
> Dilemma." It's a 1992 book by journalist William Poundstone.
Poundstone is usually given credit, falsely I agree, for "inventing"
Prisoners' Dilemma. The game itself has obviously been around for as long as
there have been cops and prisoners, but Poundstone and Rapoport are clearly
the two people who did the most to get the game's study under way.
The fact that Chris does not know this simply adds on more bit of evidence
to my claim that economics has not given games theory its due.
> >agitator. In 1943~45 when Arrow was at RAND, he not only did not have a
> >doctorate in economics; he was not working on anything which was
reconised
> >by any economics department as economics at the time....
>
> I would imagine not, since he was in the army from 1942 through
> 1946 and didn't start at RAND until 1948. When he got to RAND his
> research focused on social choice theory, which was of course
> "recognized as economics" at the time.
Arrow served in the USAAF from 1942 until at least 1946, though I've read
1948. It remains my firm impression that he joined RAND sometime in 1943-45,
and indeed being a USAAF officer would have been a help, not an impediment,
to his doing so. RAND was created and managed for the USAAF by one of the
major defense contractors.
Nothing I've found on Google settles the question either way, (the most
obvious sites being down simultaneously) but if I am wrong I am perfectly
willing to be corrected.
-dlj.
Robert Vienneau
It was first formulated to experimentally demonstrate people
don't choose Nash equilibria. (Mirowski 2002)
In article <a59cmi$2l...@acs4.acs.ucalgary.ca>, au...@acs.ucalgary.ca
(Christopher Auld) wrote:
> Robert Vienneau <rv...@see.sig.com> wrote:
> >> Defect (-1, 2) (1/2, 1 )
> >> PLAYER A Cooperate (0, 1/2) (1, -1)
> >I made a mistake:
> Bob should say "the web page I plagiarized this from made
> a mistake." He evidently copied this matrix from
>
> http://econ161.berkeley.edu/Economists/prisoners_dilemma.html
>
> which has the same typographical error.
Elsewhere on this thread, he writes:
> I agree that game theoretic modelling became
> for more prevalent in the mid-seventies -- placing this
> event about a decade before your revised date of 1985.
> Bob, in typical Vienneavian style, manages to phrase this
> as a slur -- economists "rejected" game theory up until
> this time, as if the entire mathematical and conceptual
> structure of game theory fell from the sky in 1945 and
> economists petulantly disregarded it for thirty years.
Apparently poor Chris Auld thinks no force on earth should
keep him from reading badly and from lying about what I write.
Robert Vienneau
l.ma...@worldnet.att.net wrote:
Well, this from poor Chris Auld:
An essay which could be titled "random things I know
about game theory, with some reference to John Nash."
Much of it, however, is better than Bob's usual fare.
But some glaring mistakes should be noted...
Bob then goes off for several paragraphs...
Bob then obliquely refers to...
But Bob has an emotional and negative reaction to...
...and does not seem to want to admit that...
Such pronouncements seem to make Bob happy, but it's worth
noting...
is certainly better than silly and unfounded charges of
plagiarism.
Christopher Auld
>Well, this from poor Chris Auld:
Bob, even in the sentence above (ironically enough),
your posts are invariably so full of offensive
that you long, long, ago lost any credibility in
complaining about them.
Christopher Auld
>> 1. Rapoport is not, nor has he ever been, an economist.
>Your single example of yourself does not prove my point, but it sure
>strengthens it. Of course Rapoport is an economist, among many other things.
Perhaps he will be recognized as such as soon as, say,
David Kreps is recognized as a biologist.
>> 2. I had to look up what David means by "Poundstone's Prisoners'
>> Dilemma." It's a 1992 book by journalist William Poundstone.
>
>Poundstone is usually given credit, falsely I agree, for "inventing"
>Prisoners' Dilemma.
David, Poundstone was born in 1955. The literature has been
full of discussion of PD since the early 50s. I don't see
how anyone with a clue could possibly imagien Poundstone
"invented" the PD.
> The game itself has obviously been around for as long as
>there have been cops and prisoners, but Poundstone and Rapoport are clearly
>the two people who did the most to get the game's study under way.
As I said, Rapaport did some interesting early work on the
PD. Poundstone obviously did not. Poundstone was in
grade school when legions of researchers in various
disciplines were writing papers about the PD.
>The fact that Chris does not know this simply adds on more bit of evidence
>to my claim that economics has not given games theory its due.
David, you have made so many ludicrously ignorant claims about
game theory in this thread that you should not be dreaming about
making remarks like this.
>Arrow served in the USAAF from 1942 until at least 1946, though I've read
>1948. It remains my firm impression that he joined RAND sometime in 1943-45,
Then write to Arrow and tell him he got it wrong by five years
in his autobiography.
Christopher Auld
>Apparently poor Chris Auld thinks no force on earth should
>keep him from reading badly and from lying about what I write.
Um, huh? Explain yourself or don't make accusations,
Bobby.
Christopher Auld
>is certainly better than silly and unfounded charges of
>plagiarism.
Ah yes, "silly and unfounded." The non-silly foundation
for the charge, Bob, is that the table you presented
includes the same typographical error as the table on
the web page. If you have an alternate explanation for
this remarkable coincidence, please do provide it.
David Lloyd-Jones
"Christopher Auld" <au...@acs.ucalgary.ca> wrote
> David, you have made so many ludicrously ignorant claims about
> game theory in this thread that you should not be dreaming about
> making remarks like this.
Chris,
You spray dates around at random, this was earlier, that was later -- but
you make yourself a good example of my main point: that economics has only
lately and reluctantly allowed that game theory is a major and important
part of economics. Your refusal to accept that Rapoport is, inter alia, an
economist is as clear an example as could be wanted.
> >Arrow served in the USAAF from 1942 until at least 1946, though I've read
> >1948. It remains my firm impression that he joined RAND sometime in
1943-45,
>
> Then write to Arrow and tell him he got it wrong by five years
> in his autobiography.
Had what wrong? You had him in the Army when he was in the Air Force. Now
you're going to tell me that the fact that he published civilian papers in
1948 proves that he wasn't with RAND, an Air Force project, during his
wartime service. I may very well be wrong on this very minor point, but you
haven't demonstrated it yet.
-dlj.
Robert Vienneau
"Arrow to Marschak, August 24, 1948: 'As you say, there has
been a good deal of discussion of utility and its measurability
here at RAND. By now, I'm pretty much convinced that von
Neumann has a good point in regard to measurability; as far
as probability considerations, maximizing the expectation of
utility is probably allright. Von Neumann was here recently.
He stated he did not not agree with Wald in applying minimax
ideas to the treatment of uncertainty.'"
-- Philip Mirowski, (2002).
In article <a5a0bq$56j2e$2...@ID-99058.news.dfncis.de>, "David
Lloyd-Jones" <dav...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> Of course Rapoport is an economist, among many other
> things.
"Anatol Rapoport (1911-): born in Russia, emigrated to the United
States in 1922; Ph.D. in mathematics, University of Chicago, 1941;
Air Force, 1941-46; assistant professor of mathematical biology,
University of Chicago, 1947-54; Mental Health Research Institute,
University of Michagan, 1955-1969; University of Toronto, 1970-76;
director, Institute fur Hohere Studien, Vienna, founded by Paul
Lazarsfield and Oskar Morgenstern, 1980-84. Rapoport has
published an autobiography in German, Geweissheiten und
Zweifel (1994), translated as Rapoport, 2000. The primary source
in English on his biography is Hammond, 1997. His career is one
of the more underresearched in the history of economics and the
cyborg sciences. In particular, the contemporary blindness to
his role, as well as that of the Michigan group in general, in
the rise of experimental economics is deplorable, as is the
neglect of his connection of early work on neural networks to
game-theoretic themes...
...Although 'experimental game theory' may have begun life at
RAND, it grew to adolescence at Michigan under the tutelage of
Rapoport. By the 1960s Rapoport was acknowledged as the premier
expert on empirical investigation into the legitimacy and
prevalence of game-theoretic solution concepts, as well as a
respected linguist. He coauthored the first review of the
experimental gaming literature (Rapoport & Orwant, 1962); wrote
a number of popularizations for Scientific American, and loomed
large in the subsequent gaming literature in social psychology...
In the 1960s Rapoport had decided that Flood and Dresher's
'Prisoner's Dilemma' scenario was an excellent way to
prosecute an attack on the pretensions of Nash to have understood
the psychology of strategic rationality (Rapoport & Chammah,
1965). The 'inferior' equilibrium identified by Nash was
viewed at Michigan as a symptom of the incoherence of formal
game theory; both Rapoport and the BACH group believed what
should replace it was some form of computer simulation-cum-
evolutionary theory. 'I'd always been tremendously bothered
by the Prisoner's Dilemma, says [John] Holland. It was just
one of those things I didn't like' (in Waldrop, 1992, p. 264).
The project of synthesis fell to Holland's colleague Robert
Axelrod, a political scientist with a computational background.
Axelrod took Burks's and Holland's fascination with von
Neumann's automata, and combined it with the idea of the
Prisoner's Dilemma game as a literal tournament, or perhaps a
simulation of an ongoing ecology, run entirely on a computer.
It was already obvious that the game-theoretic notion of a
'strategy' resembled the software engineer's notion of a
'program'; all one had to do then was conflate the program with
an agent and have the agents all play each other in the
computer."
-- Philip Mirowski, (2002).
The Prisoner's Dilemma wasn't first formulated by Rapoport. Since
it was first formulated to experimentally demonstrate people don't
choose Nash equilibria, it has always been closely entwined with
experimental economics.
Christopher Auld
>You spray dates around at random, this was earlier, that was later -- but
>you make yourself a good example of my main point: that economics has only
>lately and reluctantly allowed that game theory is a major and important
>part of economics.
David, I simply don't know what else to say. Almost every
factual statement you have made in this thread has been
thoroughly refuted, and the notion that I've been "spraying
dates around at random" suggests you just haven't been
listening. In regard to the main point above, I have clearly
shown that it is not the case that "economics has only lately
and reluctantly allowed...." Indeed, the extensive survey I
cited, which is itself now 22 years old, shows there was a
"consensus" as far back as the 1950s amongst economists that
game theory was a useful tool. Yet again: If you wish to
maintain your argument above in light of all this, please
provide something other than unsubstantiated assertion to
back it up.
> Your refusal to accept that Rapoport is, inter alia, an
>economist is as clear an example as could be wanted.
David, Rapoport isn't an economist. Interdisciplinary work
proceeds in many fields, but this does not make the distinctions
across fields meaningless. Some of my own research could be
reasonably referred to as epidemiology or public health. I
still call myself an economist. Rapoport does not identify
himself as an economist, in like manner. This is beside the
point, however: It is not the case that Rapoprt's work was
rejected by economists because of its game theoretic nature,
as you imply.
I notice you've dropped the preposterous claim that William
Poundstone is often thought of as the inventor of the
prisoner's dilemma. At least some progress is being made.
>> >Arrow served in the USAAF from 1942 until at least 1946, though I've read
>> >1948. It remains my firm impression that he joined RAND sometime in
>1943-45,
>>
>> Then write to Arrow and tell him he got it wrong by five years
>> in his autobiography.
>
>Had what wrong? You had him in the Army when he was in the Air Force.
If making such minor nitpicks allows you to save face you
are more than welcome to them, David. According to Arrow's
autobiography he did not go to RAND until 1948.
Christopher Auld
>The Prisoner's Dilemma wasn't first formulated by Rapoport. Since
>it was first formulated to experimentally demonstrate people don't
>choose Nash equilibria, it has always been closely entwined with
>experimental economics.
This is even more like bashing one's head into a wall than
usual.
The Prisoners' Dilemma was invented in 1950 to demonstrate
that individually optimal actions are not always socially
optimal. Contrary to Bob's misunderstanding of Mirowski,
there is a difference between the PD and the
****************** ITERATED ******************
PD. Let's say this again:
THE PD AND THE ITERATED PD ARE NOT THE SAME
GAME.
Further, the equilibrium in the single-shot PD is not
just the Nash equilibrium, it's every sensible equilibrium
out there because both players have dominant strategies.
For that reason, there is not even meaningful strategic
interaction in that game. In the **ITERATED** PD, there
can be.
Bob told us "modestly" earlier he "doesn't fully understand
game theory." Of course, this is not a "modest" claim
because no one on the planet "fully understands game
theory." What Bob should say is he "knows next to nothing
about game theory." In light of that, perhaps he might
want to for once actually listen to what's being said
rather than fighting tooth and nail to defend his initial
mistakes.
Finally, let me make a point that has yet to be made,
THE PD AND THE ITERATED PD ARE NOT THE SAME
GAME.
Do we understand, Bob?
David Lloyd-Jones
"Christopher Auld" <au...@acs.ucalgary.ca> wrote>
>
> David, I simply don't know what else to say.
Chris,
I'm perfectly willing to leave it at that. You believe that a report by some
economists 22 years ago shows that economists have long taken game theory to
be a mainstay of economics. I look at exactly the same evidence as you and
claim that economists were brought kicking and screaming into reality a mere
ten or fifteen years ago, your guys being among the brighter of the very few
early adopters.
BTW, I did not recant anything on Poundstone. he *is* widely and incorrectly
claimed to be the originator/inventor of Prisoners' Dilemma.
On Arrow I am probably wrong about his being "at" RAND before 1948, and do
not know yet whether he worked there during the war. Your claim that he
couldn't have been because he was "in the army" at the time is clearly
wrong.
Cheers,
-dlj.
Christopher Auld
>
>"Christopher Auld" <au...@acs.ucalgary.ca> wrote>
>>
>> David, I simply don't know what else to say.
>
>Chris,
>
>I'm perfectly willing to leave it at that.
Unfortunately, David then goes on:
> You believe that a report by some
>economists 22 years ago shows that economists have long taken game theory to
>be a mainstay of economics. I look at exactly the same evidence as you and
>claim that economists were brought kicking and screaming into reality a mere
>ten or fifteen years ago, your guys being among the brighter of the very few
>early adopters.
David, that "report" is a "survey." It discusses the history
of game theory in economics. It is not, as you appear to have
mistakenly inferred, one of the first examples of game theoretic
analysis in the economics litrrature. As I clearly said, it
cites many hundreds of papers by economists using game theory back
to forties. And those cites are only to papers influential
enough to make it into such a survey, not an exhaustive list.
I do not think you "look at exactly the same evidence" as me.
I think you don't have any idea what you're talking about.
You still haven't provided anything but bald, unsubstantiated
assertion to back up your claims, despite the overwhelming
evidence that has been presented against them. "Kicking and
screaming into reality ten years ago?" Horseshit. What else
could I possibly provide to demonstrate that economists have
been routinely using game theoretic tools for many decades?
>BTW, I did not recant anything on Poundstone. he *is* widely and incorrectly
>claimed to be the originator/inventor of Prisoners' Dilemma.
By the completely clueless, perhaps, although I would still like
to see even a single example. Tell you what, David: If you can
cite one academic, in any discipline, citing William Poundstone as
the "inventor" of the PD, I'll write a cheque for $100 to the
charity of your choice. For christ's sake, we're talking about
a journalist's biography of von Neumann published in 1992 --
the PD has been the single most famous and analyzed concept
in game theory for fifty years.
>On Arrow I am probably wrong about his being "at" RAND before 1948, and do
>not know yet whether he worked there during the war. Your claim that he
>couldn't have been because he was "in the army" at the time is clearly
>wrong.
David, he could have been on a submarine I still would have
referred to him as "in the army," which I mean synonomously
with "in the armed forces." Again, you are more than welcome
to write to Arrow and impatiently explain to him, as you have
to us, that he got it all wrong in his autobiography.
Robert Vienneau
(Christopher Auld) wrote:
> Robert Vienneau <rv...@see.sig.com> wrote:
> >is certainly better than silly and unfounded charges of
> >plagiarism.
> Ah yes, "silly and unfounded." The non-silly foundation
> for the charge, Bob, is that the table you presented
> includes the same typographical error as the table on
> the web page. If you have an alternate explanation for
> this remarkable coincidence, please do provide it.
Naturally, there is no such error in the Web page for which
Chris Auld provided the URL:
<http://econ161.berkeley.edu/Economists/prisoners_dilemma.html>
Paul Walker
> "Christopher Auld" <au...@acs.ucalgary.ca> wrote
>> 1. Rapoport is not, nor has he ever been, an economist.
> Chris,
> Your single example of yourself does not prove my point, but it sure
> strengthens it. Of course Rapoport is an economist, among many other
> things.
>> 2. I had to look up what David means by "Poundstone's Prisoners'
>> Dilemma." It's a 1992 book by journalist William Poundstone.
> Poundstone is usually given credit, falsely I agree, for "inventing"
> Prisoners' Dilemma. The game itself has obviously been around for as
> long as there have been cops and prisoners, but Poundstone and
> Rapoport are clearly the two people who did the most to get the
> game's study under way.
This is just wrong. The game has been around for 50 years and isn't
associated with either Poundstone or Rapoport. The history of the PD is
that in January 1950 Melvin Dresher and Merrill Flood carried out, at
the Rand Corporation, the experiment which introduced the game now known
as the Prisoner's Dilemma. These experiments were reported by Flood in a
Rand Corporation research memorandum, "Some Experimental Games", RM-789,
June 1952. Flood's 1952 memorandum was published in Flood, M. A. (1958),
"Some Experimental Games", Management Science 5, 5-26. The famous story
associated with this game is due to A. W. Tucker, "A Two-Person
Dilemma", (memo, Stanford University, 1950 - publication of Tucker's
memo occurred in 1980 under the title "On Jargon: The Prisoner's
Dilemma", UMAP Journal 1, 101.). Howard Raiffa independently conducted,
unpublished, experiments with the Prisoner's Dilemma at the same time.
Paul Walker
> "Christopher Auld" <au...@acs.ucalgary.ca> wrote>
>> David, I simply don't know what else to say.
> Chris,
> I'm perfectly willing to leave it at that. You believe that a report
> by some economists 22 years ago shows that economists have long taken
> game theory to be a mainstay of economics. I look at exactly the same
> evidence as you and claim that economists were brought kicking and
> screaming into reality a mere ten or fifteen years ago, your guys
> being among the brighter of the very few early adopters.
Why, if this is true, did the American Economics Association have Oskar
Morgenstern write an article on "The Collaboration Between Oskar
Morgenstern and John von Neumann on the Theory of Games" which was
published in the 'Journal of Economic Literature', September *1976*? Why
did the same journal publish a survey article on game theory in its June
*1980* issue? Why did Richard Stone open this *1948* 'Economic Journal'
review of von Neumann and Morgenstern with the words "Unquestionably,
for economists, the great work of von Neumann and Morgenstern is the
most important contribution that has appeared since J. M. Keynes's
General Theory was published in 1936"?
The point is a simple one, game theory was seen by economists as a
powerful tool right from the start.
Paul Walker
> "Paul Walker" <p.wa...@NOT.econ.canterbury.ac.nz> wrote
><much correct stuff snipped>
>> In short, game theory has been in economics for a long while now.
> But Paul, you confirm my timetable exactly, if anything biasing
> yourself more to the 1950's where I say 1940's, and 1990's for
> developments I am willing to allow back as far as maybe 1985.
> Game theory has been part of economics for a long time. The
> recognition of game theory as part of economics by academic
> economists is very very recent, and their pretence that they took
> part in the change from the beginning is utterly bogus.
Morgenstern was an academic economist! Economists have been using game
theory from the start. As I have already pointed out Shubiks work, for
example, goes back to the 1950s. In 1959 Shubik pointed out the
relationship between Edgeworth's idea of the contract curve and the core
in his paper "Edgeworth Market Games". Shubik also published his book
"Strategy and Market Structure: Competition, Oligopoly, and the Theory
of Games" in '59. This was one of the first books to take an explicitly
non-cooperative game theoretic approach to modelling oligopoly. The
1960s contain many examples of work on the relationship between game
theory and general equilibrium. In their 1963 paper "A Limit Theorem on
the Core of an Economy" Debreu and Scarf generalised Edgeworth, in the
context of a NTU game, by allowing an arbitrary number of commodities
and an arbitrary but finite number of types of traders. In 1964 Robert
J. Aumann further extended Edgeworth by assuming that the agents
constitute a (non-atomic) continuum in his paper "Markets with a
Continuum of Traders". These are just two very well known examples. The
oldest textbook on game theory still in print started life in 1968. In
67-68 we get the series of three papers, "Games with Incomplete
Information Played by 'Bayesian' Players", Parts I, II and III, by John
Harsanyi. Harsanyi constructed the theory of games of incomplete
information. This laid the theoretical groundwork for information
economics which, as Chris Auld has already pointed out, has become one
of the major themes of economics. In the 70s the use of non-cooperative
game theory started to grow at a huge rate, that growth has not stopped.
David Lloyd-Jones
"Paul Walker" <p.wa...@NOT.econ.canterbury.ac.nz> wrote
>
> Why, if this is true, did the American Economics Association have Oskar
> Morgenstern write an article on "The Collaboration Between Oskar
> Morgenstern and John von Neumann on the Theory of Games" which was
> published in the 'Journal of Economic Literature', September *1976*? Why
> did the same journal publish a survey article on game theory in its June
> *1980* issue? Why did Richard Stone open this *1948* 'Economic Journal'
> review of von Neumann and Morgenstern with the words "Unquestionably,
> for economists, the great work of von Neumann and Morgenstern is the
> most important contribution that has appeared since J. M. Keynes's
> General Theory was published in 1936"?
>
> The point is a simple one, game theory was seen by economists as a
> powerful tool right from the start.
Paul,
You are using a major tool of historical distortion, claiming that the acts
of a very few were typical of a larger group.
Game theory now being seen azs valuable, it is in the interests of large
numbers of people to pretend that they were with it from the start, and that
start was way back when.
The fact remains, you are picking whitecaps and claiming they are the wave,
pointing to the wave and claiming it is the ocean.
As you have seen in this discussion, Chris Auld denies that Rapoport is an
economist. What could make my point clearer?
-dlj.
Robert Vienneau
RAND to demonstrate that people do not play Nash equilibria, that
von Neumman and Morgenstern equilibria are more empirically
relevant to the way people actually play.
Notice that this statement is of the form:
Flood and Fresher first formulated the PD to demonstrate p.
The truth or falsity of p is not relevant to the truth or falsity
of this statement.
Nor is it relevant how well-taken Nash's comments on the results of
the initial experiment were. After all, standard protocols and an
understanding of what's relevant in experiments did not fall from
the sky in 1950. They had to be developed over the course of decades.
I did like John Williams' comment in the initial experiment:
"He's a shady character and doesn't realize we are playing a 3rd
party, not each other."
(See <http://econ161.berkeley.edu/Economists/prisoners_dilemma.html>)
What has the development of game theory and experimental economics
in the interim shown? Here's the opinion of one mainstream economist:
"Ironically, game theory, which for so long was predicated upon
agent rationality, has shown us, by example, the shakiness of the
concept. For one thing, the centipede game and others like it show
that there is nothing substantively 'rational' about even so
simple a thing as eliminating dominated strategies. Moreover, the
solution to some games (even when unique) is often so
sophisticated that it is implausible that ordinary people would be
willing to spend the resources to discover it. This supports the
evolutionary notion that good strategies diffuse across populations
of players rather than being learned by 'rational optimizers.'
Finally, experimental studies of dictator, ultimatum, and public
goods games indicate that if people are 'rational,' it must be in a
sense far more sophisticated than the simple, self-interested,
maximization of expected utility.
It is better to drop the term 'rational; altogether, which is what
we do in this book (a word search shows that the term does appear a
couple of times without surrounding quotation marksè°onsistency is
surely not my hobgoblin!). (I still find some economists saying
something to the effect that 'all we mean by rationality is that
people choose the best means toward achieving given ends.' However
(a) the same economists in practice routinely equate rationality with
'self-interest,' and (b) in strategic interaction, 'choosing the best
means' leads to a logical infinite descent, since how agent A chooses
the best means depends on how he models how agent B chooses the best
means, which depends in turn on how agent B models how agent A models
how agent B chooses the best means, and so on, and conversely.)
Similar remarks apply to the concept of 'beliefs.' In classical
game theory, beliefs are characteristics of individuals that explain
behavior. In evolutionary game theory beliefs are either shorthand
ways of describing evolved behavior ('the bird believes the brightly
colored butterfly is inedible') or are simply suppressed. The
knowledgeable reader will note that this book dispenses with 'beliefs'
even in dealing with Bayesian games, where they normally run rampant.
This treatment is carefully prepared theoretically.
-- Herbert Gintis
<http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~gintis/gtevolve_index.html>
Notice Gintis' (unoriginal) objection that the notion of "rationality"
leads to an infinite descent. This objection is generally applicable,
not confined to some backwater of game theory. Here's Arrow on the
same theme:
"When these assumptions [of equilibrium, competition, and the
completeness of markets] fail, the very concept of rationality
becomes threatened, because perceptions of others and, in
particular, of their rationality become part of one's own
rationality. Even if there is a consistent meaning, it will
involve computational and informational demands totally at
variance with the traditional economic theorist's view of
the decentralized economy."
-- Kenneth Arrow, a victim of a leftist conspiracy,
_New Palgrave_.
The early history of the PD was accompanied by a misattribution of
its creator. For example,
"We turn now to a different example of a non-zero-sum game. This
one is attributed to A. W. Tucker..."
-- R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa (1957).
Apparently David has confused Poundstone and Tucker. (I once read
a book by Poundstone popularizing von Neumann's
self-reproducing celluar automata. He outlined the theory,
though, with Conway's Game of Life, a different celluar
automata than used in vN's original proof outline. Neat
stuff, this.)
Morgenstern was disappointed in how little he was able to interest
the Princeton economics department in game theory. He was able
to find lively interest in the Princeton mathematics department,
though, e.g. by Nash, Shapley, and Shubik, if I understand their
backgrounds correctly. By the way, Luce and Raiffa's Ph. D.'s
are in mathematics. Morgenstern's disappointment in economists
generalized. He wrote a paper in the 1970s - in the Journal of
Economic Literature, I think - arguing that economists should
take more of an interest in game theory than they had previously.
Mirowski is a member of a community of historians looking at
economics. E. Roy Weintraub is another member of this community.
Weintraub's recent research interests include trying to
developing an understanding of how the norms of mathematicians
shaped the development of modern economics. After all, so
much was developed by trained mathematicians, as opposed to
researchers trained as economists. vN and game theory are
relevant to Weintraub's research, and Mirowski and Weintraub
have coauthored papers.
susupply
"Christopher Auld" <au...@acs.ucalgary.ca> wrote in message
news:a5bs36$2b...@acs4.acs.ucalgary.ca...
> David Lloyd-Jones <dav...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> >Had what wrong? You had him in the Army when he was in the Air Force.
>
> If making such minor nitpicks allows you to save face you
> are more than welcome to them, David. According to Arrow's
> autobiography he did not go to RAND until 1948.
And even the nitpick is wrong. There was no separate U.S. Air Force until
1947. Until that time it was the U.S. Army Air Force.
Christopher Auld
>Game theory now being seen azs valuable, it is in the interests of large
>numbers of people to pretend that they were with it from the start, and that
>start was way back when.
David, numerous examples of prominent, mainstream, game
theoretic economic ideas dating back to the 40s have been
presented to you. For the n-th time: What other evidence
could possibly be required, or possibly be presented, to
refute your increasingly ridiculous argument? Do you
have any evidence to support your increasingly weird case?
>As you have seen in this discussion, Chris Auld denies that Rapoport is an
>economist. What could make my point clearer?
I don't know, maybe some sort of evidence instead of
unsubstantiated assertion? Let us even suppose, for
the sake of argument, that Rapoport has a Ph.D. in
economics, publishes in economics journals, teaches
in an economics department, wears a wee name tag that
reads "Hi! My name's Anatol and I'm an economist!"
and was still snubbed by the discipline. How exactly
would this be evidence in support of your ridiculous
claims, rather than evidence that one game theorist
did not receive his due attention?
Let's go through this again, slowly. I am not denying
that Rapoport's work is of interest to economists, nor
that it influenced economic thought. I don't know
enough about his work to judge whether it is under-
appreciated by economists, perhaps it is. What I am
explaining to you, David, is that academics primarily
define themselves in terms of the discipline they interact
with the most; for Rapoport that isn't economics. *He*
does not identify himself as an economist; it is surreal
for you to shrilly jump up and down complaining about
others not referring to him as such; it is more fantastic
still to for some reason claim this as unassailable
evidence economists were opposed to game theory until
ten years ago.
Christopher Auld
>Flood and Dresher first formulated the Prisoner's Dilemma at
>RAND to demonstrate that people do not play Nash equilibria, that
>von Neumman and Morgenstern equilibria are more empirically
>relevant to the way people actually play.
I don't know whether the common attribution to Tucker
is mistaken or not. I will repeat, yet again:
The game analyzed by Flood and Dresher is
NOT THE PRISONERS' DILEMNA.
Should I explain this with the help of crayons? What
on earth would it take to get this across?
The unique NE in the single-shot PD is also the vNM
maximin equilibrium. It's every sensible equilibrium
one can think of because both players have dominant
strategies. Bob apparently doesn't understand what
I mean by that.
[ Snip: utter irrelevancies. To Vienneau, elementary
concepts such as "subgame perfect equilibrium" required
to understand almost any application of game theory in
the modern literature, or issues of rationality in
game theory, are "details he forgets." I doubt he's
ever read, or cares, about any game theory that proposes
to help us understand the world. No, he's got a new
book full of juicy quotes and negative meta-analysis
about economics! Joy! Better to read through it
looking for ammo than to try to understand any of these
issues. Maybe he'll lend it to Jay Hanson when he's done. ]
David Lloyd-Jones
"Christopher Auld" <au...@acs.ucalgary.ca> wrote
>
> David, numerous examples of prominent, mainstream, game
> theoretic economic ideas dating back to the 40s have been
> presented to you. For the n-th time: What other evidence
> could possibly be required, or possibly be presented, to
> refute your increasingly ridiculous argument? Do you
> have any evidence to support your increasingly weird case?
Chris,
<sigh> Once again, follow the bouncing ball. These ideas are being
presented, by you in your panoply of academic radiance, in the year
2002.You, today, take them for granted as "important tools of economics," to
use your formulation du jour.
The question is, when were they generally recognsied by academic economics
as an integral and/or foundational part of economics. Your claim seems
repeatedly to be the moment they sprang from their originators' brows. My
claim is during the 1990's, with the ideas' taking hold being mainly visible
from about 1989 onward.
What is weird is not my patience but your daily polishing your academic
sneer while doing nothing more than repeating the dates of authorship of an
assortment of Important Papers which changes from day to day as you beaver
away at your bibliographies. Your idea of "proof" is simply repetition of
the irrelevant.
-dlj.
David Lloyd-Jones
"susupply" <susu...@mindspring.com> wrote in message
news:a5di42$ecl$1...@slb1.atl.mindspring.net...
Patrick,
I was born on a USAAF base, and used the term USAAF from the start -- as you
obviously saw when/if you read the post that you are claiming to correct.
-dlj.
Christopher Auld
>Naturally, there is no such error in the Web page for which
>Chris Auld provided the URL:
I erred, and apologize.
Christopher Auld
>What is weird is not my patience but your daily polishing your academic
>sneer while doing nothing more than repeating the dates of authorship of an
>assortment of Important Papers which changes from day to day as you beaver
>away at your bibliographies. Your idea of "proof" is simply repetition of
>the irrelevant.
David, could you please clearly explain why noting the
demonstrable fact that many hundreds of influential papers
using game theoretic ideas had been published decades
prior to your proposed date for "acceptance" of game
theory by economists is "irrelevant"? Your claim
>Fogel's [1991] "Games Theory and Economics" was as far as I know the first
>text to be taken seriously as economics by academic economists, i.e. the
>people who teach economics,
is just fantastically wrong. vNM's seminal 1944
text was the "first to be take seriously as economics
by academic economists." And the academic economics
literature on game theory, as you have seen in this thread,
has been substantial ever since.
Does it not phase you at all that almost every factual
statement you've made in this thread is demonstrably
wrong, often spectacularly so? While I can understand
why someone who thinks the prisoners' dilemma was
invented by a journalist in 1992 might imagine game
theory was only recognized in the nineties, the argument
does not jibe with the tremendous amount of evidence
to the contrary which has been presented.
Now, again, since you keep ignoring the request: You
are making an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary
claims require extraordinary evidence. You have provided
nothing but unsubstantiated assertion. Perhaps you can
see why this line of argument has failed to be compelling.
susupply
"David Lloyd-Jones" <dav...@sympatico.ca> wrote in message
news:a5dtoc$6lo37$2...@ID-99058.news.dfncis.de...
> Patrick,
>
> I was born on a USAAF base, and used the term USAAF from the start -- as
you
> obviously saw when/if you read the post that you are claiming to correct.
>
> -dlj.
So this is your way of apologizing to Chris for: "You had him in the Army
when he was in the Air Force."?
Patrick
David Lloyd-Jones
> David Lloyd-Jones <dav...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
>
> David, could you please clearly explain why noting the
> demonstrable fact that many hundreds of influential papers
> using game theoretic ideas had been published decades
> prior to your proposed date for "acceptance" of game
> theory by economists is "irrelevant"?
It's irrelevant because the fact of being published somewhere does not equal
being taken seriously by the profession. In the case of RAND it was long the
bias of most of the profession that this stuff was all out there in defence
la-la land and had nothing to do with the real world.
> Your claim
> >Fogel's [1991] "Games Theory and Economics" was as far as I know the
> >first
> >text to be taken seriously as economics by academic economists, i.e. the
> >people who teach economics,
>
> is just fantastically wrong. vNM's seminal 1944
> text was the "first to be take seriously as economics
> by academic economists."
That'll be the first time anybody ever called Von Neuman and Moirgenstern a
textbook. As for taken seriously, it was taken in by a minuscule number at
that time, Chris. Follow the bouncing ball. It was not taught to
undergraduates, it was not a staple among graduates. It was a curiosity.
>And the academic economics
> literature on game theory, as you have seen in this thread,
> has been substantial ever since.
>
> Does it not phase you at all that almost every factual
> statement you've made in this thread is demonstrably
> wrong, often spectacularly so?
I think you mean "faze," and the rest of it you're making up. Your
"spectacularly wrong" is just the sound of your own voice echoing loud in
your own ears.
You are claiming that the economics profession was wise enough, thoughtful
enough, and well-informed enough to take all the wonders you choose off your
screen seriously the day they were written. I say that's spinach. I say the
good ones among them were slowly accepted by the "profession" over time,
starting in the late '80's, and getting there in the '90's.
You talk about extreme claims needing extreme proof. Your claim is so
extreme as to be ridiculous on its face. Mine is simply the observation that
in economics as in anything else, things happen gradually -- and economists
like other professionals tend to backdate their successes.
> While I can understand
> why someone who thinks the prisoners' dilemma was
> invented by a journalist in 1992
Chris, if by that you mean me, you've retreated from bluster into the lie
direct. Please review the corresponsdence and post your apology.
-dlj.
David Lloyd-Jones
>
> So this is your way of apologizing to Chris for: "You had him in the Army
> when he was in the Air Force."?
Patrick,
You're having real trouble with the English language this week, aren't you?
(And incidentally, you well picked over little nit, you misquote me. What I
said to Chris was not "in the Air Force," but "...in the USAAF." Your
ability to apologise does not seem to have caught up with the lie in your
previous post, repeated in your misquotation above.)
The USAAF was no more "the army" than the Salvation Army is the 82nd
Airborne, fluttering their little cupid wings.
Since RAND was a conspicuously air force operation, the difference is
relevant to the argument -- as Chris surely knew when he tried to put the
ball away with that particular shot.
Now the fact is Kenneth Arrow spent his war years doing theoretical work on
weather forecasting. I don't know, but my guess, from the way people refer
to him as being "at RAND," is that he was in fact at Douglas Aircraft, a
group notably interested in weather forecasting, and may have been working
in or with the group that later, after 1945, greeted the public as "The Rand
Corporation."
The official story is that RAND was founded in 1945, but in fact people
refer to it in conversation as though it existed before that, so I am just
guessing here. Stay tuned.
-dlj.
Robert Vienneau
Lloyd-Jones" <dav...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> The official story is that RAND was founded in 1945, but in fact people
> refer to it in conversation as though it existed before that, so I am
> just
> guessing here. Stay tuned.
"Project RAND was originally the resultant of two sets of events in
1945... The fact that it began as a subsidy to an aircraft
producer betokens the historical accident of a close relationship
between Air Force general Hap Arnold and Donald Douglas...
The project was put under the direction of Douglas Aircraft
engineers Arthur Raymond and Franklin Collbohm, and physically
situated at the Douglas Aircraft plant..."
-- P. Mirowski (2002).
Robert Vienneau
Flood and Dresher:
TABLE 1: ORIGINAL PRISONER'S DILEMMA
PLAYER B
STRATEGY Defect Cooperate
PLAYER A Defect (0, 1/2) (1, -1)
Cooperate (-1, 2) (1/2, 1)
The Nash equilibrium is (Defect, Defect). This solution
arises by viewing the PD as a non-cooperative game.
But I want to look at it as a cooperative game and find
the solution, in the sense of vN and M. Figure 1 graphs the
payoffs for the pure strategies, a, b, c, and d. Table 2
shows which point is which strategy. The Nash equilibrium, d,
happens to lie on the line connecting points a and b. Player
A can choose his strategy from some probability distribution;
likewise for player B. This allows the players to obtain linear
combinations of the pure strategies. Thus, any payoff in
the triangle abc is possible. (This set, in general, is convex.)
B's payoff
|
a 2 +
|
|
+
e
|
1 + b
|
|
1/2 d f
|
-1 | 1/2 1
--+-------+-------+-------+-------+--> A's Payoff
|
|
+
|
|
-1 + c
FIGURE 1: SPACE OF PAYOFFS FOR ORIGINAL PD
TABLE 2: PURE STRATEGIES
STRATEGY POINT
Defect, Defect d
Defect, Cooperate c
Cooperate, Defect a
Cooperate, Cooperate b
Suppose the players agree beforehand what their probabilities
will be. They can ensure a payoff on the locus consisting of the
union of the segments ab and bc. Either player can pull out of
this coalition and join with nature, so to speak. No player will
be happy with a payoff less than he can obtain alone. This
constraint is reflected on the graph by points e and f. Point
e is the intersection of the line ab with the y axis. Note that
this axis runs through the Nash equilibrium vertically. Point f
is the intersection of the line bc with a horizontal line
running through the Nash equilibrium.
The solution to the original PD, in the sense of vN and M,
is the set formed by the union of the line segments eb and
bf. Notice point b, formed by both players cooperating, is
in this solution set. The Nash equilibrium is not.
I believe some such analysis was at the back of John Williams'
mind when he wrote:
"He's a shady character and doesn't realize we are playing a 3rd
party, not each other."
This was during Flood and Dresher's experiment with an iterated
version of this game.
By the way, if one reads Mirowski's new history as an
entirely "negative meta-analysis" of economics, one reads badly.
"Machines, it seems, are good to think with" -- Philip Mirowski
(and he doesn't reference Sandra Harding here).
Poor Chris Auld.
REFERENCES:
John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, TGEB, 3rd Edition, 1953.
R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa, Games and Decisions, 1957.
Christopher Auld
>It's irrelevant because the fact of being published somewhere does not equal
>being taken seriously by the profession.
Actually, David, sequences of papers published in places like
Econometrica does equal "being taken seriously by the profession."
This grows tiresome.
[snips]
>You are claiming that the economics profession was wise enough, thoughtful
>enough, and well-informed enough to take all the wonders you choose off your
>screen seriously the day they were written.
[...]
>You talk about extreme claims needing extreme proof. Your claim is so
>extreme as to be ridiculous on its face.
How anyone, even on usenet, can say something like this after
having seen it incontrovertably and thoroughly demonstrated
wrong is a mystery perhaps left to denizens of sci.psychology.
Please review the numerous cites from Paul Walker and myself
clearly showing that game theory has been important in
economic thought long before the late eighties. You could
try to explain away, for example, two economists noting in
a survey published in 1980 that there was "consensus" by
the late fifties that game theory was the appropriate tool
to study strategic interactions. You could then write to
the authors and explain that that claim is "so extreme as
to be ridiculous on its face," indeed, you could tell them
their article cannot exist, as one cannot survey a literature
which likewise doesn't exist.
Game theory has been "accepted as economics" since at least
1944. Yes, it has become increasingly popular over time. No,
it has never been considered "not economics;" no, economists
have not "rejected it because they were "afraid of being called
game theorists." You seem to think I'm saying this because
I scurried off to obscure, dusty tomes to hunt for references
that predate 1988. I don't: I say this because off the top
of my head I can think of many critically important, and long
recognized as such, game theoretic ideas in mainstream thought.
Your idea that it takes forty years for academics to accept
new ideas is generally wrong; in this case it is spectacularly.
so. Long before 1944 economists were aware of the fact that
they had no reasonable apparatus to study microinteractions;
game theory provided such an apparatus and it has been much
studied and largely "accepted" as a useful tool since
immediately after its introduction.
Finally, contrary to your strange ideas over how academia
works, numerous publications in outlets such as Econometrica
and the AER is, in fact, evidence that the profession takes
these ideas seriously. Now, for the last time: Present
something other than naked assertion to support your claims.
>Chris, if by that you mean me, you've retreated from bluster into the lie
>direct. Please review the corresponsdence and post your apology.
David, you referred to it as "Poundstone's prisoners' dilemma,"
so of course what I wrote is not a "lie." You then retreated
to "it's commonly mistakenly attributed to Poundstone," which
is also plainly wrong. You have yet to acknowledge that. Bob
thinks you've confused Tucker and Poundstone, which may be
the case. Whether or not that is so, you owe me an apology
for insisting the fact I didn't "know" Poundstone invented
the PD was an example of ignorance amongst economists regarding
game theory supporting your case.
con...@email.rahul.net
The official history is at:
John
Robert Vienneau writes:
> In article <a5es0n$6tv9a$1...@ID-99058.news.dfncis.de>, "David
> Lloyd-Jones" <dav...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
>
> > The official story is that RAND was founded in 1945, but in fact people
> > refer to it in conversation as though it existed before that, so I am
> > just
> > guessing here. Stay tuned.
>
> "Project RAND was originally the resultant of two sets of events in
> 1945... The fact that it began as a subsidy to an aircraft
> producer betokens the historical accident of a close relationship
> between Air Force general Hap Arnold and Donald Douglas...
> The project was put under the direction of Douglas Aircraft
> engineers Arthur Raymond and Franklin Collbohm, and physically
> situated at the Douglas Aircraft plant..."
> -- P. Mirowski (2002).
--
John Conover, con...@email.rahul.net, http://www.johncon.com/
David Lloyd-Jones
"Robert Vienneau" <rv...@see.sig.com>
>
> "Project RAND was originally the resultant of two sets of events in
> 1945... The fact that it began as a subsidy to an aircraft
> producer betokens the historical accident of a close relationship
> between Air Force general Hap Arnold and Donald Douglas...
> The project was put under the direction of Douglas Aircraft
> engineers Arthur Raymond and Franklin Collbohm, and physically
> situated at the Douglas Aircraft plant..."
> -- P. Mirowski (2002).
>
Bob, (or Robert, or whosomever)
This is another official story. (But I thought your other quotes from this
Mirowski, whose stuff I haven't read, were great.) The 50th Anniversary
celebration of RAND, in 1995 (!) showed their Santa Monica headquarters as a
very frumpy downtown office building -- not the fun-palace out by the beach,
and certainly not any aircraft plant.
For the present -- and if necessary I'll get on the phone to Arrow -- I'm
sticking with my story, with the claim only that it's the best I can do: As
far as I know what came to be known as "The Rand Corporation," or RAND,
existed as a coherent group, with the name "RAND" from 1943 onwards in Santa
Monica, probably under the management of, or within, Douglas Aircraft.
Cheers,
-dlj.
David Lloyd-Jones
Chris Auld simultaneously claims that everything was published in
Econometrica Way Back When, which proves that his economics profession was
omniscient and superluminary, and that Rapoport -- world champion of
iterated Prisoners' Dilemma under Axelrod's first set of rules and then,
rather to everybody's amazement under the second round's rules as well -- is
not an economist. Or hasn't published in Economerica. or something. But he
is a foundation stone of modern economics without being an economist.
Whatever.
I don't see how Chris can have it both ways -- and I don't see how he missed
the slightly meta- joke that he as economist not seeing this contradiction,
not seeing that he can't have it both ways, is one small bit of evidence for
my claim that economists have come late and reluctantly to the game theory
party.
This is getting boring, and I'm outta here. Patrick and Chris both owe me
apologies, because they have both published lies about me in the course of
their arguments. But I won't hold my breath.
I would say I'd gained some respect for Robert Vienneau's grim grinding of
the books, but for the fact that the amount of respect I can give in that
department had aleready reached 11 on a scale of 10 where he is concerned.
Despite our various disagreements, however, I think his decent
straightforward posts stand in some contrast to Patrick's and Chris's.
-dlj.
David Lloyd-Jones
> for insisting the fact I didn't "know" Poundstone invented
> the PD was an example of ignorance amongst economists regarding
> game theory supporting your case.
Christopher Auld
Robert Vienneau <rv...@see.sig.com> wrote:
> Consider the Prisoner's Dilemma, as first formulated by
>Flood and Dresher:
[ Snip: some irrelevant game theory. ]
> Poor Chris Auld.
I can only wonder what point Bob thinks he might be winning
here. Anyways, I suppose it's worth pointing out that
treating the PD as a cooperative game, while not "wrong" in
any formal sense, entirely misses the point. The reason that
the PD is interesting and so often studied is that it is a
simple and robust way to model situations in which all can do
better if they cooperate, but each also may gain individually
by not cooperating. One simply assumes the problem away if
one instead treats the game as cooperative: Bob's post can be
adequately summarized
If the PD is played cooperatively, cooperation by both
players can be obtained.
We thank Bob for his insight. Of course, Flood and Dresher's
experiment was one in which the PD was played non-cooperatively
(but iterated). And, as I've mentioned, in the single-shot PD
both players defecting is not just the Nash equilibrium, it's
every sensible equilibrium, including of course von Neumann
and Morgernstern's concepts for non-cooperative games. Even
if we consider related contexts in which agents don't "choose"
in a meaningful sense but rather evolve hard-coded strategies,
always defecting is all that survives under randomly matched
single shot PDs (it's the unique ESS). The trick in many
contexts (in economics and many other fields) is in figuring
out how to maintain cooperation in light of all this. Simply
assuming cooperation and thereby completing ignoring all these
issues clearly doesn't help us think about that deep issue.
Paul Walker
CC7715.220...@news.dreamscape.com:
> Consider the Prisoner's Dilemma, as first formulated by
> Flood and Dresher:
> TABLE 1: ORIGINAL PRISONER'S DILEMMA
> PLAYER B
> STRATEGY Defect Cooperate
> PLAYER A Defect (0, 1/2) (1, -1)
> Cooperate (-1, 2) (1/2, 1)
> The Nash equilibrium is (Defect, Defect). This solution
> arises by viewing the PD as a non-cooperative game.
> But I want to look at it as a cooperative game and find
> the solution, in the sense of vN and M.
This doesn't make sense. The fundamental point about cooperative games
is that binding agreements are allowed, so the players agree on the
efficient outcome, end of story.
David Lloyd-Jones
news:a5f26k$rbg$1...@samba.rahul.net...
John,
Correction: One official history is at
I had fun reading it over last night, finding a couple of old friends, and
spotting a few people I hope will be future friends. But RAND is a large and
interesting place, big enough and interesting enough that people who were
there at the time can have different versions of what happened when.
Cheers,
-dlj.
Christopher Auld
>A small other kick at the can:
>
>Chris Auld simultaneously claims that everything was published in
>Econometrica Way Back When, which proves that his economics profession was
>omniscient and superluminary, and that Rapoport -- world champion of
>iterated Prisoners' Dilemma under Axelrod's first set of rules and then,
>rather to everybody's amazement under the second round's rules as well -- is
>not an economist. Or hasn't published in Economerica. or something. But he
>is a foundation stone of modern economics without being an economist.
>Whatever.
I guess this is in lieu of some sort of evidence to back up
David's assertions.
Of course I never said anything such as "the economics profession
was omniscient and superluminary." I said game theory was widely
recognized as useful and "part of economics" long before the late
eighties, and any reasonable observer glancing at the vast
literature Paul and I referenced could not disagree. Even Mr.
Vienneau disagreed with David on that point, go figure. I think
from the confusion above David still just doesn't get what I mean
when I say Rapoport isn't an economist. Suppose it is true
that Rapoport's work is underappreciated by most economists: so
what? That wouldn't be any evidence whatsoever in support of
David's claims.
Paul Walker
> "Paul Walker" <p.wa...@NOT.econ.canterbury.ac.nz> wrote
>> Why, if this is true, did the American Economics Association have
>> Oskar Morgenstern write an article on "The Collaboration Between
>> Oskar Morgenstern and John von Neumann on the Theory of Games" which
>> was published in the 'Journal of Economic Literature', September
>> *1976*? Why did the same journal publish a survey article on game
>> theory in its June *1980* issue? Why did Richard Stone open this
>> *1948* 'Economic Journal' review of von Neumann and Morgenstern with
>> the words "Unquestionably, for economists, the great work of von
>> Neumann and Morgenstern is the most important contribution that has
>> appeared since J. M. Keynes's General Theory was published in 1936"?
>> The point is a simple one, game theory was seen by economists as a
>> powerful tool right from the start.
> Paul,
> You are using a major tool of historical distortion, claiming that
> the acts of a very few were typical of a larger group.
No, if you look at the Schotter and Schwodiauer 1980 survey it alone has
more than 250 references. Somebody must have been doing game theory!
> Game theory now being seen azs valuable, it is in the interests of
> large numbers of people to pretend that they were with it from the
> start, and that start was way back when.
> The fact remains, you are picking whitecaps and claiming they are the
> wave, pointing to the wave and claiming it is the ocean.
> As you have seen in this discussion, Chris Auld denies that Rapoport
> is an economist. What could make my point clearer?
I'm with him on that point. Rapoport is professor emeritus of Psychology
and Mathematics at the University of Toronto, he has a Phd in maths. His
work was mainly outside economics, in areas like systems sciences, studies
in conflict and cooperation, and peace research. He was for 15 years
Professor of Mathematical Biology at the University of Michigan. At
Toronto he has worked as Professor of Psychology and Mathematics, and as a
Professor for Peace and Conflict Studies. Not the cv of an economist.
Christopher Auld
>"Christopher Auld" <au...@acs.ucalgary.ca> wrote=20
[ snip: another in a long stream of pointless insults. ]
>>. Whether or not that is so, you owe me an apology
>> for insisting the fact I didn't "know" Poundstone invented
>> the PD was an example of ignorance amongst economists regarding
>> game theory supporting your case.
>If you thought that I said that on the basis of something I wrote, then
>I apologise without reservation to our shared readership for
>underestimating your illiteracy and wilful ignorance..
The insults are up to a one-per-sentence rate. Still no
evidence or anything other than foot-stomping. My remark
above refers to:
Poundstone is usually given credit, falsely I agree, for "inventing"
Prisoners' Dilemma. The game itself has obviously been around for as
long as
there have been cops and prisoners, but Poundstone and Rapoport are
clearly
the two people who did the most to get the game's study under way.
The fact that Chris does not know this simply adds on more bit of evidence
to my claim that economics has not given games theory its due.
><coloured crayon> Poundstone gets a lot of underserved credit for
>Prisoners' Dilemma because he wrote a good popular book about it.
No, he didn't. He wrote a biography of John von Neumann in
1992 which bears the title. As I've repeatedly said, no one
with a clue could possibly think Poundstone invented the
PD, nor that he did such a large and early amount of work
on it such that it should bear his name. I have offered to
donate $100 to the charity of David's choice if he can offer
even one example of an academic making this "widespread"
error. Oddly, David chooses to insult me and stomp his feet
insisting he's right, but isn't collecting that easy $100
for the needy group of his choice.
The rest of David's rant is not worth repeating. I hope he
is as ashamed of himself as he ought to be.
David Lloyd-Jones
"Paul Walker" <p.wa...@NOT.econ.canterbury.ac.nz> wrote
> This doesn't make sense. The fundamental point about cooperative games
> is that binding agreements are allowed, so the players agree on the
> efficient outcome, end of story.
Paul,
The fundamental point about being either of the prisoners is that it isn't
cooperative, and you can't make a binding agreement.
Bzzzt. Thanks for playing.
-dlj.
RP Johnson
"David Lloyd-Jones" <dav...@sympatico.ca> wrote in message
news:a5dtoc$6lo37$1...@ID-99058.news.dfncis.de...
>
> Chris,
>
> <sigh> Once again, follow the bouncing ball. These ideas are being
> presented, by you in your panoply of academic radiance, in the year
> 2002.You, today, take them for granted as "important tools of economics,"
to
> use your formulation du jour.
>
> The question is, when were they generally recognsied by academic economics
> as an integral and/or foundational part of economics. Your claim seems
> repeatedly to be the moment they sprang from their originators' brows. My
> claim is during the 1990's, with the ideas' taking hold being mainly
visible
> from about 1989 onward.
>
> What is weird is not my patience but your daily polishing your academic
> sneer while doing nothing more than repeating the dates of authorship of
an
> assortment of Important Papers which changes from day to day as you beaver
> away at your bibliographies. Your idea of "proof" is simply repetition of
> the irrelevant.
>
> -dlj.
I'm not sure when or where you studied economics, but I was a graduate
student in economics from 1963 to 1966. During that time, vNeuman &
Morgenstern was an assigned text in the grad micro sequence and Henderson &
Quant (now probably long out of print) was a standard text. At that time,
along the west coast, linear programming and game theory were regarded as
THE hot topics for graduate students to master. And this was by no means
some sort of underground student rebellion against the standard fare being
dished up by the faculty. This was the fare being dished up by the faculty
(in economics, by the way).
Oh, one last point (for those of you not acquainted with USA history): up
until 1946, the US Air Force did not exist as such, It was the US Army Air
Force and was not a separate service like the navy or the marines. So
Professor Arrow was probably in the US Army Air Force, and most people
simply refer to it as the army.
Don't you and Chris have better things to do up there in the Great White
North than this sort of head banging?
RP Johnson
David Lloyd-Jones
> >>. Whether or not that is so, you owe me an apology
> >> for insisting the fact I didn't "know" Poundstone invented
> >> the PD was an example of ignorance amongst economists regarding
> >> game theory supporting your case.
> >If you thought that I said that on the basis of something I wrote, then
> >I apologise without reservation to our shared readership for
> >underestimating your illiteracy and wilful ignorance..
> The insults are up to a one-per-sentence rate. Still no
> evidence or anything other than foot-stomping. My remark
> above refers to:
> Poundstone is usually given credit, falsely I agree, for "inventing"
> Prisoners' Dilemma. The game itself has obviously been around for as
> long as
> there have been cops and prisoners, but Poundstone and Rapoport are
> clearly
> the two people who did the most to get the game's study under way.
>
> The fact that Chris does not know this simply adds on more bit of
evidence
> to my claim that economics has not given games theory its due.
But Chris,
Your remark does *not* refer to what you quote me -- accurately thanks to
the existence of cut'n'paste -- as writing.
You have exposed your lie yourself.
-dlj.
David Lloyd-Jones
"Paul Walker" <p.wa...@NOT.econ.canterbury.ac.nz> wrote
>
> No, if you look at the Schotter and Schwodiauer 1980 survey it alone has
> more than 250 references. Somebody must have been doing game theory!
Paul,
Of course they were. Now then, where's your list of universities where any
of this stuff was on the curriculum before the years I mentioned, say 1989
to choose the latest, and give you the greatest chance?
I had written:
> > As you have seen in this discussion, Chris Auld denies that Rapoport
> > is an economist. What could make my point clearer?
Paul, you replied:
> I'm with him on that point. Rapoport is professor emeritus of Psychology
> and Mathematics at the University of Toronto, he has a Phd in maths. His
> work was mainly outside economics, in areas like systems sciences, studies
> in conflict and cooperation, and peace research. He was for 15 years
> Professor of Mathematical Biology at the University of Michigan. At
> Toronto he has worked as Professor of Psychology and Mathematics, and as a
> Professor for Peace and Conflict Studies. Not the cv of an economist.
Since when did the affirmation of A constitute a refutation of B? Rapoport
has throughout his career done more economics in a morning that your average
second rate university professor can imagine in a career.
I'm tempted to shout, but I'll keep my fingers off the caps lock: he, like
Morgenstern and Von Neuman and Raiffa and Nash and a few dozen others
created The Monster Which Ate Economics, kindly leaving a better more useful
economics in its place.
Now Chris wants to say that one of the greatest living members of the group
is not an economist, and at the same time he wants to claim that
"economists," a group to which he has tightly tied his own identity, knew
everything these geniuses knew the day they said it and before the ink on
the galleys was dry.
Gimme a break. Chris joined Robert Vienneau in falsely backdating the love
of the economics profession for game theory. I called them on it. Chris has
been screeching and yowling in the night ever since. Now showing on the
World Wide Web: the faculty club hissy fit.
-dlj.
David Lloyd-Jones
> Of course I never said anything such as "the economics profession
> was omniscient and superluminary."
Uh, Chris, every syllogism you have written in the last few days has been
posited on the premise that publication of a paper somewhere constituted
recognition by the profession of economics.
> I said game theory was widely
> recognized as useful and "part of economics" long before the late
> eighties, and any reasonable observer glancing at the vast
> literature Paul and I referenced could not disagree.
You said rather more than that, Chris. You had the Professional Economist's
wisdom on the subject backdated into the 1940's, which is utter hooey.
> Even Mr.
> Vienneau disagreed with David on that point, go figure.
Exactly correct. As I pointed out in my first post, it was fun to see you
both making the same mistake -- or perhaps using the same distortion.
> I think
> from the confusion above David still just doesn't get what I mean
> when I say Rapoport isn't an economist.
I see no confusion above. I see you, Chris, backpedalling like crazy, though
not yet apologising for your several lies.
> Suppose it is
true
> that Rapoport's work is underappreciated by most economists: so
> what? That wouldn't be any evidence whatsoever in support of
> David's claims.
It would precisely support the only, very modest, claim I have made around
this fact -- a fact which Chris now grudgingly seems to concede. This claim
was, attentive archeologists at this trainwreck will agree, that Chris
Auld's refusal to concede it was a minor example of a datum supporting my
contention that economists, and here I assumed that Chris is an economist,
were slow to admit the value of game theory. (Little did I expect my "were"
to run up into February of 2002.) One swallow does not make a summer -- but
Chris was demonstrably making himself en exception to his own claim that
everybody was with the program ages ago.
-dlj.
Mark Patrick Witte
Clearly game theory is something that economics ignored and avoided from the
time of Cournot until...basically the mid 1940s when von Neuman and
Morgenstern made it impossible to ignore any longer. Then economics was one
of a number of fields where many people began to use and develop the tools
and techniques in the game theory methodology. Did those who did the most to
develop these tools feel that their contributions were undervalued by others
in economics who did not spend all their time doing game theory? Well, big
shock there!
The claim that the field of economics (rather than some economists) ignored
game theory is purely silly. Consider this recent list of the most
influential journals in economics:
http://www.feweb.vu.nl/econometriclinks/rankings/KalaitzidakisMamuneasStengos2001.pdf
By this list, the top journals for influence in the field of economics are
American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy,
Journal of Economic Theory, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of
Economic Studies (8), and Review of Economics and Statistics (13).
Guess where John Harsanyi published all his most important papers? AER,
Econometrica, and JPE, beginning in 1953. Guess where Nash published "The
Bargaining Problem" (1950) and "Two-Person Cooperative Games" (1953)?
Econometrica. Where did Reinhard Selten publish his paper with Marschak on
"Restabilizing Responses, Inertia Supergames, and Oligopolistic Equilibria"
(1978)? QJE. Where did Tom Schelling publish his "Essay on Bargaining"
(1956)? Econometrica.
Here is a very limited list of some of the other greatest hits from game
theory, published in the most widely read and influential journals in
economics.
A Revolution in Economic Theory?, Carl Kaysen, The Review of Economic
Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1. (1946 - 1947), pp. 1-15.
Neumann's and Morgenstern's New Approach to Static Economics, J. Marschak,
The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 54, No. 2. (Apr., 1946), pp. 97-115.
Demand Theory Reconsidered, Oskar Morgenstern, The Quarterly Journal of
Economics, Vol. 62, No. 2. (Feb., 1948), pp. 165-201.
Information, Theories of Competition, and the Theory of Games, Martin
Shubik, The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 60, No. 2. (Apr., 1952), pp.
145-150.
A Comparison of Treatments of a Duopoly Situation, J. P. Mayberry, J. F.
Nash, M. Shubik, Econometrica, Vol. 21, No. 1. (Jan., 1953), pp. 141-154.
What Has Happened to the Theory of Games, Leonid Hurwicz, The American
Economic Review, Vol. 43, No. 2, (May, 1953), pp. 398-405.
Information, Risk, Ignorance, and Indeterminacy, Martin Shubik, The
Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 68, No. 4. (Nov., 1954), pp. 629-640.
A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice, Herbert A. Simon, The Quarterly
Journal of Economics, Vol. 69, No. 1. (Feb., 1955), pp. 99-118.
Diagrammatic Exposition of a Theory of Public Expenditure, Paul A.
Samuelson, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 37, No. 4. (Nov.,
1955), pp. 350-356.
The Determination of Subjective Characteristic Functions in Games with
Misperceived Payoff Functions, R. Duncan Luce, Ernest W. Adams,
Econometrica, Vol. 24, No. 2. (Apr., 1956), pp. 158-171.
Theory of the Reluctant Duelist, Daniel Ellsberg, The American Economic
Review, Vol. 46, No. 5. (Dec., 1956), pp. 909-923.
The Theory of Inventory Decisions, Edwin S. Mills, Econometrica, Vol. 25,
No. 2. (Apr., 1957), pp. 222-238.
Utilities, Attitudes, Choices: A Review Note, Kenneth J. Arrow,
Econometrica, Vol. 26, No. 1. (Jan., 1958), pp. 1-23.
Recurrent Objections to the Minimax Strategy, Anthony Y. C. Koo, The Review
of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 41, No. 1. (Feb., 1959), pp. 36-41.
For the Abandonment of Symmetry in Game Theory, T. C. Schelling, The Review
of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 41, No. 3. (Aug., 1959), pp. 213-224.
Problems of Majority Voting, Gordon Tullock, The Journal of Political
Economy, Vol. 67, No. 6. (Dec., 1959), pp. 571-579
I'll stop before I get to the 1960s and 1970s when the number of economics
papers in the area simply explodes.
Searching JSTOR.org, which surely is a flawed methodology but I can think of
none better, I find that economics has more articles with references
to game theory than all the other academic fields combined, with Political
Science coming in a poor second, and mathematics well back.
Suffice it to say that for the past half century, game theory has immensely
influenced, and been influenced by the field of economics. To claim
otherwise is pure foolishness.
(Did Rapoport ever publish a single article in an economics journal? And
how tall is Richard Gephardt?)
Christopher Auld
>> Of course I never said anything such as "the economics profession
>> was omniscient and superluminary."
>Uh, Chris, every syllogism you have written in the last few days has been
>posited on the premise that publication of a paper somewhere constituted
>recognition by the profession of economics.
It does. This doesn't imply "economics profession is
omniscient and superluminary." Rather, numerous publications
in major journals indicates the topic is recognized by
many as important.
[ snip: insult, no content ]
>It would precisely support the only, very modest, claim I have made around
>this fact -- a fact which Chris now grudgingly seems to concede. This claim
>was, attentive archeologists at this trainwreck will agree, that Chris
>Auld's refusal to concede it was a minor example of a datum supporting my
>contention that economists, and here I assumed that Chris is an economist,
>were slow to admit the value of game theory. (Little did I expect my "were"
>to run up into February of 2002.) One swallow does not make a summer -- but
>Chris was demonstrably making himself en exception to his own claim that
>everybody was with the program ages ago.
This is surreal.
Christopher Auld
>I'm tempted to shout, but I'll keep my fingers off the caps lock: he, like
>Morgenstern and Von Neuman and Raiffa and Nash and a few dozen others
>created The Monster Which Ate Economics, kindly leaving a better more useful
>economics in its place.
>Now Chris wants to say that one of the greatest living members of the group
>is not an economist, and at the same time he wants to claim that
>"economists," a group to which he has tightly tied his own identity,
Actually, I think only one of the above group would identify
himself as "an economist," and who am I to contradict them?
Christopher Auld
>"Paul Walker" <p.wa...@NOT.econ.canterbury.ac.nz> wrote
>> This doesn't make sense. The fundamental point about cooperative games
>> is that binding agreements are allowed, so the players agree on the
>> efficient outcome, end of story.
>The fundamental point about being either of the prisoners is that it isn't
>cooperative, and you can't make a binding agreement.
>
>Bzzzt. Thanks for playing.
>
> -dlj.
Oh, the humanity.
David, you mixed up.... Oh why bother.
David Lloyd-Jones
"Mark Patrick Witte" <mwi...@merle.acns.nwu.edu> wrote
> The claim that the field of economics (rather than some economists)
ignored
> game theory is purely silly. Consider this recent list of the most
> influential journals in economics:
>
http://www.feweb.vu.nl/econometriclinks/rankings/KalaitzidakisMamuneasStengo
s2001.pdf
Mark,
That list is published in 2001, and I consider it good evidence that the
part of the profession of economics represented by its authors had, by 2001,
recognised the importance of game theory.
-dlj.
David Lloyd-Jones
"Christopher Auld" <au...@acs.ucalgary.ca> wrote
>
> Actually, I think only one of the above group would identify
> himself as "an economist," and who am I to contradict them?
Chris,
I know this may be hard for you to take, but they may have thought that
economics was something they did on the side, and was therefore not their
main source of identity.
-dlj.
David Lloyd-Jones
>
> I'm not sure when or where you studied economics, but I was a graduate
> student in economics from 1963 to 1966. During that time, vNeuman &
> Morgenstern was an assigned text in the grad micro sequence and Henderson
&
> Quant (now probably long out of print) was a standard text. At that time,
> along the west coast, linear programming and game theory were regarded as
> THE hot topics for graduate students to master.
RP,
You are the first person in this discussion to have a glimmer of the notion
of what it might mean to present a fact that contradicts my proposition. And
you give it a reasonable shot.
You don't say where you went to school, but I am certainly willing to give
you what you claim: that: at some better US universities, particularly those
in California, where game theory had been around in the atmosphere more than
twenty years, economics departments began to recognise it at the graduate
level in the late 1960's. (FWIW I was introduced to Kenneth Arow in Santa
Barbara in 1968. I don't think the economics Nobel existed yet, but the
people who made the introduction, maily Rex Tugwell, certainly thought he
walked on water.)
This still puts you roughly a generation away from Chris's and Robert's
original claims. And yes, I know about the USAAF: that's why I referred to
it in the first place.
Yes, I have lots better to do in the Great White North. This is just an
exercise for the left pinky.
Cheers,
-dlj.
Robert Vienneau
Walker <p.wa...@NOT.econ.canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> Robert Vienneau <rv...@see.sig.com> wrote in news:rvien-
> CC7715.220...@news.dreamscape.com:
> > Consider the Prisoner's Dilemma, as first formulated by
> > Flood and Dresher:
>
> > TABLE 1: ORIGINAL PRISONER'S DILEMMA
>
> > PLAYER B
> > STRATEGY Defect Cooperate
> > PLAYER A Defect (0, 1/2) (1, -1)
> > Cooperate (-1, 2) (1/2, 1)
>
> > The Nash equilibrium is (Defect, Defect). This solution
> > arises by viewing the PD as a non-cooperative game.
> > But I want to look at it as a cooperative game and find
> > the solution, in the sense of vN and M.
> This doesn't make sense. The fundamental point about cooperative games
> is that binding agreements are allowed, so the players agree on the
> efficient outcome, end of story.
Another concept of equilibrium in a game existed when Nash came up
with his own concept of equilibrium. Flood was not happy with Nash's
concept. He therefore worked with Dresher to create a simple example
to contrast these two concepts. He had a hypothesis which people
would play - not the Nash equilibirum. He tested that hypothesis with
an experiment. Looking back, we can criticize the protocols of that
experiment. In fact, Nash had some criticisms upon being told the
results.
For any of this to make sense, the example must show two different
results for the two different equilibrium concepts. It does.
The (C, C) result is part of the vN and M equilbirum. The Nash
equilibrium (D, D) is not.
Thank you for playing.