News tagged with game theory
Game theory, in the real world
For students in New York and Boston, who have a range of options beyond their neighborhood school, choosing a high school used to be a maddeningly complicated guessing game. In Boston, for instance, many students would list ...
Other Sciences / Social Sciences
May 02, 2012 |
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Game of go: A complex network
Could computers ever beat the best go players? Although unthinkable at this stage, this could soon become possible, thanks to CNRS theorists. For the first time, two scientists from the Theoretical Physics ...
Apr 16, 2012 |
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Imposing trade restrictions on parallel imports can motivate a firm to export, study finds
(Phys.org) -- Imposing trade restrictions on parallel imports has the surprising effect of motivating a firm to export, according to a new study using game theory economic analysis.
Other Sciences / Economics & Business
Apr 11, 2012 |
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From herd immunity and complacency to group panic: How vaccine scares unfold
Worries over vaccine risks can allow preventable contagious diseases, such as measles and whooping cough, to make a comeback. A new study, published in PLoS Computational Biology, shows how to predict ways in which popula ...
Apr 05, 2012 |
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Interrogational torture: Effective or purely sadistic?
While government officials have argued that "enhanced interrogation techniques" are necessary to protect American citizens, the effectiveness of such techniques has been debated. According to a recent study, when torture ...
Other Sciences / Social Sciences
Mar 28, 2012 |
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Using game theory to understand the physics of cancer propagation
In search of a different perspective on the physics of cancer, Princeton University and University of California, San Francisco researchers teamed up to use game theory to look for simplicity within the complexity of the ...
Mar 27, 2012 |
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A new take on the games people play in their relationships
Human nature has deep evolutionary roots and is manifested in relationships with family members, friends, romantic and business partners, competitors, and strangers more than in any other aspects of behavior or intellectual ...
Mar 21, 2012 |
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When prejudices become a disadvantage
(PhysOrg.com) -- Swiss researchers from ETH Zurich have been exploring the question of whether prejudices might be rational under certain conditions. Using game theory, they created various scenarios and played ...
Other Sciences / Social Sciences
Mar 08, 2012 |
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New success model for microfinance: A matter of trust
In some countries, poor borrowers repay loans to microcredit lenders at rates of close to 100 percent while other countries see repayment rates so low that it makes microlending unsustainable - a disparity ...
Other Sciences / Economics & Business
Dec 22, 2011 |
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Auctions, traffic, selfishness, and data privacy: It all comes down to math
Every time you run a Google search, a split-second automated auction takes place to determine which of many competing companies will get to fill the ad space in your browsing window. The program controlling ...
Nov 08, 2011 |
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Protecting networks is just a game
How can an organization detect the onset of an attack on its computer network giving it time to respond quickly and block any intrusion or compromise of its data? Modern firewalls and other technology are already in place, ...
Technology / Computer Sciences
Jul 27, 2011 |
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Shame and honor increase cooperation
Honour and shame work equally well in encouraging social cooperation, according to a new study by researchers at the University of British Columbia and the Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology.
Other Sciences / Social Sciences
Jun 01, 2011 |
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To bluff, or not to bluff? That is the question
Economist Christopher Cotton from the University of Miami (UM), uses game theory to explore two of the most famous military bluffs in history. The findings are published in the current issue of the Journal of Peace Research.
Other Sciences / Social Sciences
May 23, 2011 |
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From airports to ocean: Anti-terror patrol randomizing system begins trials in Boston Harbor
It began with work on randomizing airport security police patrol routines at Los Angeles International Airport while still maintaining the same level of protection. The example spread across the nation, and is now methodically ...
Apr 14, 2011 |
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Programming regret for Google: Scientists give computers 'hindsight' to anticipate the future
Human beings are well aware that hindsight is 20/20 -- and the product of this awareness is often what we call "regret." Could this hindsight be programmed into a computer to more accurately predict the future? Tel Aviv University ...
Technology / Computer Sciences
Apr 13, 2011 |
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Game theory
Game theory is a branch of applied mathematics that is used in the social sciences (most notably economics), biology, engineering, political science, international relations, computer science, and philosophy. Game theory attempts to mathematically capture behavior in strategic situations, in which an individual's success in making choices depends on the choices of others. While initially developed to analyze competitions in which one individual does better at another's expense (zero sum games), it has been expanded to treat a wide class of interactions, which are classified according to several criteria. Today, "game theory is a sort of umbrella or 'unified field' theory for the rational side of social science, where 'social' is interpreted broadly, to include human as well as non-human players (computers, animals, plants)" (Aumann 1987).
Traditional applications of game theory attempt to find equilibria in these games. In an equilibrium, each player of the game has adopted a strategy that they are unlikely to change. Many equilibrium concepts have been developed (most famously the Nash equilibrium) in an attempt to capture this idea. These equilibrium concepts are motivated differently depending on the field of application, although they often overlap or coincide. This methodology is not without criticism, and debates continue over the appropriateness of particular equilibrium concepts, the appropriateness of equilibria altogether, and the usefulness of mathematical models more generally.
Although some developments occurred before it, the field of game theory came into being with the 1944 book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. This theory was developed extensively in the 1950s by many scholars. Game theory was later explicitly applied to biology in the 1970s, although similar developments go back at least as far as the 1930s. Game theory has been widely recognized as an important tool in many fields. Eight game theorists have won Nobel prizes in economics, and John Maynard Smith was awarded the Crafoord Prize for his application of game theory to biology.
For more information about Game theory, read the full article at
Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
