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Category Archives: Cooperation
In memory of Thomas Schelling, the errant economist
Update (1/22/17): check out this touching tribute to Schelling by Glenn Loury. (Hat tip: Garrett Jones, via Twitter.) We have been trying to stay away from the Internet during our “Christmas sabbatical” to spend more time with our family, attend to … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Bayesian Reasoning, Cooperation, Economics, Game Theory
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Caption this
Romney's popular vote share: 47%.Trump's popular vote share: 46.5%. pic.twitter.com/fidZaaSZj0 — Leigh Caldwell (@leighblue) November 30, 2016 I made the Trump/Romney photo black and white, and it looks like a Twilight Zone episode where a guy just made a foolish … Continue reading
Posted in Cooperation, Current Affairs, Deception, Politics
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Daniel Dennett’s four rules
We recently stumbled upon this short post by Maria Popova (“How to criticize with kindness”) explaining philosopher Daniel Dennett’s “four rules” of fair-minded, scholarly criticism. In brief, before you begin to refute or criticize someone else’s ideas, you should do … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Bayesian Reasoning, Cooperation, Philosophy, Truth
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Prisoner’s dilemma everywhere: weekend email from your boss edition
As our friends and fellow “forty-something” bloggers at Cheap Talk like to point out, prisoner dilemmas are everywhere. Suppose you are a junior manager at a large Fortune 500 corporation or a junior attorney/accountant at a firm. Your boss sends … Continue reading
Posted in Cooperation, Deception, Economics, Game Theory
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A question for Professors Fried & Shiffrin
Charles Fried is best known (among scholars of contract law) for his “contract as promise” thesis, while Seana Shiffrin is widely known for her influential 2007 Harvard Law Review article on the divergence between contract and promise. We too are … Continue reading
Posted in Cooperation, Law, Philosophy
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Should Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz drop out? (Republican Primary Prisoner’s Dilemma)
Our friend and colleague Steve Landsburg makes the following two observations on his blog: (i) “for either Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio to become the Republican nominee, he must first consolidate the anti-Trump vote, which is to say that either … Continue reading
Posted in Cooperation, Politics, Probability
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Game theory: the way forward? (part 3 of 3)
In our previous two posts, we identified a blind spot in the work of John Rawls and Bob Nozick: the problem of betrayal–what game theorists call “defection.” In brief, Rawls’s original agreement might embody timeless principles of justice, and Nozick’s … Continue reading
Posted in Cooperation, Game Theory, Law, Philosophy
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Rawls vs. Nozick (part 2 of 3)
In our previous post, we identified a weakness in Rawls’s theory of justice: the possibility of betrayal once the veil of ignorance is lifted. Now, let’s turn to Robert Nozick’s classic tome Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a book Nozick … Continue reading
Posted in Cooperation, Game Theory, Law, Philosophy
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A critique of Rawls and Nozick and a new way forward (part 1 of 3)
For the next three posts, we are going to offer a critique of John Rawls’ theory of justice (part 1), followed by a critique of Robert Nozick’s theory of the pre-political state (part 2), and then offer our own alternative … Continue reading
Posted in Cooperation, Game Theory, Law, Philosophy
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prior probability 