Selten's Game

"Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." John Maynard Keynes

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This site uses the tools of modern economics and game theory to explore how the interaction of intelligent goal-seeking individuals determines social outcomes. Find out more about game theory.

Behavioral Mechanism Design: Those of us who have analyzed experimental data or watched participants in the laboratory have noticed that while some people seem to be inattentive and unpredictable others seem to be striving to create incentives for good social outcomes. I developed a formal model of noise, ethical, and selfish players in a new paper "Behavioral Mechanism Design as a Benchmark for Experimental Studies." The remarkable fact is that calibrating the model to data on non-strategic decision problems does a remarkably good job in predicting quantitatively what happens in experiments involving strategic interactions. [Posted at 06/30/2024 03:19 AM by David K. Levine ]

The Skeptical Economist: Complex Systems and Social Incentives:
richMy inaugural lecture at Royal Holloway. You can view the slides here. [Posted at 06/12/2024 01:36 AM by David K. Levine ]

Appeasement and Deterrence: Lee Ohanian and I have a new paper arguing that appeasement is under-appreciated: When to Appease and When to Punish: Hitler, Putin, and Hamas [Posted at 04/07/2024 01:36 AM by David K. Levine ]

Social Mechanisms and Political Economy: The Book: Our new book available for download: Levine, Mattozzi and Modica study how special interests such as cartels and lobbyists together with political parties influence our well-being. Drawing on existing and ongoing theoretical, empirical, and experimental research by the authors and others, the book develops a unified theory of peer pressure and social networks. The theory is firmly grounded in modern economic and game theory and is based on incentive constraints, auction theory, learning theory, and stochastic evolution. [Posted at 12/19/2022 02:51 AM by David K. Levine ]

Intervention:

and peace? [Posted at 10/18/2018 02:29 AM by David K. Levine ]

Latest papers (more papers, more research, more news)

"Behavioral Mechanism Design as a Benchmark for Experimental Studies" [06/06/24]
"Razor-Thin Mass Elections with High Turnout" [01/27/24] (with C. Martinelli)
"Efficiently Breaking the Folk Theorem by Reliably Communicating Long Term Commitments" [12/04/23]
"Cooperating Through Leaders" [07/10/23] (with S. Modica and A. Rustichini)
"Twin Peaks: Expressive Externality in Group Participation" [05/27/23] (with S. Modica and J. Sun)


General interest material about game theory, including an introductory essay, a reading list, and a forum for questions and answers. You can also find information about the work of Armen A. Alchian, Jack Hirshleifer and other general interest material.

Play a game: challenge the on-line forecaster, engage in the cooperative learning game or solve a game using the zero-sum game solver.

About this site and the server it resides on. If you are google or another search engine, you will want to read the listing of papers in the archive.

 

Resources in Economics

Social Mechanisms and Political Economy

Theoretical Economics

Economic Theory News

Against Monopoly

RePEc: online papers

Society for Economic Dynamics

Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory

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