After the second homework assignment, faurik commented on the question referring to an iterated prisoner’s dilemma. Specifically, faurik explained how in the one-shot game, the Nash Equilibrium of both players confessing does not necessarily hold in this new game. The observation arises because players realize that the game repeats for an unknown number of times, […]

In “What was I thinking?” Elizabeth Kolbert reviews a new book by MIT economist Dan Ariely, “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions” (Harper, 2008). Kolbert begins her piece by describing a seemly irrational act of purchasing an additional book from Amazon simply to get free shipping. Throughout her review, she […]

Watching Monty Python the other day, I found my thoughts wandering once again back to Networks 204 and Gladwell’s description of a syphilis epidemic in Baltimore: how it spread from the projects along local highways during summer months and contracted during the winter. Explicitly drawing a connection between contagious viral diseases and transportation networks […]

Ending in 2002, the lengthy anti-trust case against Microsoft illuminated current economic theories on imperfect competition and transaction costs, which involve game theory to analyze the behavior of companies. In classical economics, companies operating in a perfectly competitive environment have no influence over the price, which is determined entirely by market factors. Most industries are […]

http://www.allacademic.com/one/prol/prol01/index.php?cmd=prol01_search&offset=0&limit=5&multi_search_search_mode=publication&multi_search_publication_fulltext_mod=fulltext&textfield_submit=true&search_module=multi_search&search=Search&search_field=title_idx&fulltext_search=Cantankerous+Cooperation%3A+Democracies%2C+Authoritarian+Regimes+and+the+Prisoners+Dilemma
 
The results of the political bargaining process play a great role in decisions concerning foreign policy. Therefore, game theory lies at the heart of Democratic Peace Theory, which stipulates that democratic states seldom go to war against one another. This theory is strongly supported by observed evidence and data and has been extensively discussed; however, […]

Economics 204 has made apparent the importance of networks as a crucial component of the world. Whether its in the development of the internet and how its original structure amongst a few universities has developed to bring information to billions of people across the world, or the basic networks people develop amongst themselves which facilitates […]

Earlier in the semester we discussed that we live in a small world, in which there are, on average, “six degrees of separation” between all individuals. However, in aSmallWorld (ASW), an exclusive online social network, everyone is connected by at most three degrees of separation. The following is the site’s description of itself:
ASMALLWORLD is […]

http://www.hinduonnet.com/2005/03/12/stories/2005031208552000.htm
The above article talks about the effect that walking has on world cricket. For those of you unfamiliar with the game, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket
In short, cricket is a game played between two teams where, much like baseball, there exists a batsman, a bowler who throws the ball at the batsman, and the fielders who try […]

Throughout the course, I have enjoyed the fact that our social networks are compared to “harder” sciences (potential energy of an auction or the current of the “water cycle” of PageRank). As a biologist, I am more familiar with the concepts of physics and math than I am with those of economics or sociology, […]

A new Australian online dating website utilizes the philosophy of “six degrees of separation,” which we previously discussed in class. This idea proclaims that everyone in the world is separated by only six other people. Contrary to many other online dating services, this new site (MeetMyFriend) “allows users to introduce their single friends to the […]