A catalog of weird-ass corners of game theory research

Cory Doctorow 5:51 am Mon Jul 25, 2016

Game theory is the place where politics, economics, psychology and math meet, and it offers the seductive promise of being able to quantify empirically optimal outcomes from thorny problems ranging from whether to go to war to how to split the tab at a restaurant.

The published, peer-reviewed world of game theory has reached many "counterintuitive" conclusions, many of which were cataloged by Stanford Postdoctoral Fellow William Spaniel in 2014. You could spend all day getting lost in these.

* There’s a reason why gas stations are on the same corner and politicians adopt very similar platforms. And it’s the same reason. Source.

* If you pay the value you think something is worth, you are going to end up with a negative net profit. Source.

* Knowing just slightly more about the value of your car than a potential buyer can make it impossible to sell it. Source.

* A biased media may be better than an unbiased media. Source.

* You might want to shoot to miss in war. Source.

Game Theory Is Really Counterintuitive
[William Spaniel]

(via Four Short Links)

(Image: Go Board, Fcb981, CC-BY-SA)

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