This is turning into a fascinating year for litigation. Of course there is the former President and his four indictments, as well as his continued civil troubles. The civil troubles feature an old lawsuit about a videophone he was hawking back in the day -- a marketing scheme that was mostly about selling the right to sell the phones, or selling the right to sell the right, etc, in classic pyramid fashion. That aside, the year 2023 has seen the trial and conviction of Alex Murdaugh for the murder of his wife and son. The Telles/German case is still hanging fire. Dominion's lawsuit against Fox News would really have enlivened the year. As it happened, the willingness of the Fox empire to pay three quarters of a billion dollars to avoid a trial was itself remarkable and almost as much fun. Another great upcoming trial expected this year will be that of Sam Bankman-Fried, one time impresario of the great cryptocurrency exchange, FTX. The cas...
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Let's state The Prisoner’s Dilemma explicitly. Just 'cause I'm in a mood. Suppose two criminals have together robbed a bank. Police have captured and are interrogating them both. The police could get them both on a lesser charge (say, reckless discharge of their weapons) even if neither confesses on the big charge (the armed robbery). They are interrogating the prisoners in separate facilities, thus with no chance to communicate. The police offer each prisoner, simultaneously, the following deal: “Confess, ratting on your buddy, and you will be set free. We will convict your buddy and he will serve three years in prison. If you refuse to confess, your buddy may well take this same deal, and you will serve three years in prison, he will walk free. “If you rat on him and he rats on you, we’ll have to convict and punish both of you.But we won’t w ant your cooperation to go unrewarded, so in that case we promise a one-year cut on your sentence...
The citation practices of an academic of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Not perhaps the most obviously compelling subject for a blog post. The practice of ostracism in Mediterranean ports in the middle ages. Likewise. But ... put them together? I've just been mucking about in the "history" of the wikipedia page on Avner Greif -- a page I first created, though years ago. I created that page out of fascination with a certain work of Greif's to which I'll return, but there have been many changes to the page since I last paid attention. I've noticed quite a bit of contention about his citation practices, and about whether he is shorting someone else out of credit for her accomplishments in the field of institutional economics. Hmmmm. Where do we start? Oh, here's a place.! "Institutional economics" flourished in the 1920s and '30s and boasted such luminaries as Thorstein Veblen and John R. Commons. It sees (mostly hierarchic...
"In general equilibrium analysis, agents do not interact with one another directly, but only through impersonal markets. By contrast, in game theory all players interact with all other players, with outcomes specified by the game's payoff matrix." Brian Arthur et al aren't so much contrasting game theory against GE analysis here, although that is what it sounds like. Rather they are saying that GE and GT have something in common, and they propose a model of economics, "complexity," that moves away from that commonality. The quote comes from a introduction to a volume published in 1997 by the Santé Fe Institute, and as Arthur later wrote it was "as close as out economics program ... came to a manifesto." The commonality is that interaction structures in both of the older theories are simple and extreme, either one-with-all or all-with-all. In complexity, agents are chunked, so some interact more with their neighbors than with distant partie...
An old paradox, named after a game show host, the emcee of "Let's Make a Deal" continuously from 1963 to 1976, and intermittently as revived thereafter. Monty Hall presented contestants with three curtains, often labeled A,B, and C, and asked them to make a choice. They would get whatever gift was behind the curtain they chose. In the story/paradox, Monty tells you that behind one of the curtains is a magnificent new car, the car of your dreams. Behind the other two curtains, not-so-desirable gifts. You tell him: "I pick A, Monty." Monty: "Not so fast! I will now reveal what is behind curtain C." The curtain opens, and there is some worthless gag gift, say a pile of shaving cream. Monty: "Now, you can stay with your choice of A, or you can switch to B." What should you do? The usual first response, and for many people a very powerful intuitive response, is that it doesn't matter what you do. You now have just two curtai...