{"id":6604,"date":"2012-06-06T10:39:31","date_gmt":"2012-06-06T14:39:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/?p=6604"},"modified":"2012-06-06T10:40:52","modified_gmt":"2012-06-06T14:40:52","slug":"truth-in-advertising-game-theory-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/6604","title":{"rendered":"Truth in Advertising, Game Theory Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">Q: Looking at the flipside, was there ever a situation in which you were pleasantly surprised at what game theory was able to deliver?<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">A: None. Not only none, but my point would be that categorically game theory cannot do it. Maybe somewhere in a\u00a0Sherlock Holmes\u00a0or Agatha Christie story there was a situation where the detective was very clever and he applied some logical trick that somehow caught the criminal, something like that. You know in America there was a programme on CBS, called\u00a0<em>Numbers<\/em>, written\u00a0<em>Numb3rs<\/em>, with the \u2018e\u2019 reversed.\u00a0<em>Numb3rs<\/em>\u00a0wanted to make people curious about mathematics through detective stories. I happened to hear about it because I had done some experimental work with Amos Tversky and Dana Heller, about the game of hide and seek. In\u00a0one of the episodes\u00a0they refer to the paper. Of course it was a joke, but the fact that my name was mentioned in such a programme made me very happy. But outside such programmes, I categorically cannot see any case where game theory could be helpful.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s from The Browser&#8217;s <a title=\"Ariel Rubinstein on Game Theory\" href=\"http:\/\/thebrowser.com\/interviews\/ariel-rubinstein-on-game-theory\" target=\"_blank\">FiveBooks interview<\/a> with Tel Aviv University&#8217;s Ariel Rubinstein, one of the world&#8217;s most prominent game theorists.<\/p>\n<p>We used the <a title=\"Osborne and Rubinstein (1994)\" href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Course-Game-Theory-Martin-Osborne\/dp\/0262650401\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1338992497&amp;sr=8-1\" target=\"_blank\">textbook<\/a> Rubinstein wrote with Martin Osborne in the second-semester microeconomic theory course I took during the first year of my Ph.D.<\/p>\n<p>I really enjoyed going through the material (especially in contrast with the second half of the course, on general equilibrium theory). Since then, however, I have been struck time and again by the limited applicability of game theory. It&#8217;s interesting that one of the world&#8217;s leading game theorists is forthcoming about that lack of applicability.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Q: Looking at the flipside, was there ever a situation in which you were pleasantly surprised at what game theory was able to deliver? A:&#8230;<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/6604\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Truth in Advertising, Game Theory Edition<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,55,53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-economics","category-education","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gPg8-1Iw","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6604"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6604\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6615,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6604\/revisions\/6615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}