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Category Archives: Law
We owe Tom Brady an apology …
When news of #DeflateGate broke after the AFC Championship Game in January 2015, we were among the first bloggers to condemn quarterback Tom Brady and the New England Patriots for breaking NFL rules. After all, the Patriots have cheated before, … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Culture, Current Affairs, Games, Law, Sports
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Legal probabilities
In this post, we build on the work of Dixit & McAdams (see our previous two posts) in order to create a general bargaining model of civil litigation. Let’s consider a civil case for our model. Specifically, let’s assume the case has … Continue reading
Posted in Economics, Game Theory, Law
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Politics as Nash bargaining
In our previous post, we presented this beautiful essay by Avinash Dixit and David McAdams, who use game theory to analyze the year-long political impasse over the U.S. Supreme Court. We now wish to say a few more words about … Continue reading
Posted in Economics, Game Theory, Law, Politics
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Game Theory 101 (Scalia’s replacement edition)
Check out this excellent essay in the Harvard Business Review in which two academic economists, Avinash Dixit and David McAdams, use game theory to analyze the year-long political impasse over the U.S. Supreme Court. Game theory is a branch of … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Economics, Game Theory, Law, Politics
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How are big box stores like Wells Fargo?
Lots of big box retailers like Walmart and Home Depot are ramping up their use of self-scanners in order to reduce their labor costs. That is, instead of waiting in a long line to have a cashier ring up your purchases, you can save … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Deception, Ethics, Game Theory, Law, Probability, Web/Tech
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Cheating pays … Just ask Wells Fargo execs
What’s up with Wells Fargo’s CEO? According to the N.Y. Times, “Wells Fargo was flowing with regrets …, taking out ads in nearly a dozen newspapers saying the bank took ‘full responsibility’ for creating sham bank accounts without its customers’ … Continue reading
Posted in Cheating, Current Affairs, Deception, Ethics, Law
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Typology of parliaments
Check out this fascinating review of the book Parliament. (The review is by Margaret Rhodes; the book, by David Mulder van der Vegt and Max Cohen de Lara.) In summary, Mssrs. Mulder van der Vegt and Cohen de Lara studied the … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Law, Politics, Questions Rarely Asked
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Cars kill more people than guns
Claudia Dreifus, a writer for the NY Times, recently interviewed Edward Humes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. The subject of the interview is Humes’s latest book (pictured below) on the deadly dangers of automobiles. The book is titled “Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Ethics, Law, Probability
4 Comments
Necessity as a conjecture (post 5 of 5)
In our previous post (9/6), we referred to the work of legal scholar Giorgio Agamben, and we presented our own pragmatic or “common sense” view of the doctrine of necessity: necessity as a safety valve or gap-filling device for unforeseeable or … Continue reading
Posted in Ethics, Law, Philosophy
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prior probability 