Author Archives: brendano

The Jungle Economy

I wish I knew Hebrew. Well, fortunately there is also an English article version of Equilibrium in the Jungle (Piccione and Rubinstein ’06): In the typical analysis of an exchange economy, agents are involved in consumption and exchange goods voluntarily … Continue reading

1 Comment

funny comic

[doesn't fit well; please click.]Thx Words and Other Things.

5 Comments

Anarchy vs. social order in Somalia

In light of the Somali transitional government’s recent military triumph over Islamist forces, the BBC did a piece of very interesting testimonials from everyday Somalis — they all want a government for peace and order in their lives. Anarchy is … Continue reading

Leave a comment

Double thesis action

Earlier this year, it turned out that humans socially evolved cooperation through group competition and conflict. And now, it seems that biased evidence assimilation can happen through bounded rationality. Hooray.

Leave a comment

A big, fun list of links I’m reading

Since blogging is hard, but reading is easy, lately I’ve taken to bookmarking interesting articles I’m reading, with the plan of blogging about them later. This follow-through has happened a few times, but not that often. In an amazing moment … Continue reading

2 Comments

4-move rock, paper, scissors!

Contrary to baseless speculation, it turns out it is possible to have a four-player, non-degenerate RPS game. The game below is assymetrical: B does better than others, but you don’t want to play it all the time because that makes … Continue reading

Leave a comment

Two Middle East politics visualizations

These are both useful summaries. Slate has a chart of relationships between Hamas, Hezbollah, Israel, and Lebanon, versus a number of different actors in the region. NYTimes has something similar on a map, also showing the sizes of ethnic/religious groups. … Continue reading

Leave a comment

neuroscience and economics both ways

I previously posted two neuroeconomics reviews. Here’s a new one from this year in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. It’s interesting because not only does it look at using psychological knowledge to inform economics, but it also reviews work in the … Continue reading

Leave a comment

Social network-ized economic markets

Extremely interesting — a generalization of Arrow-Debreu equilibrium in which interactions are restricted along a social network. Kakade et al 2005. (Found through NIPS 2004 (which looks like a great conference)). Also a longer and more detailed related version: Kakade … Continue reading

Leave a comment

Rock, Paper, Scissors

Pure game theory is debatably social science, so here goes. Inspired by various 5-, 7-, and even 25-move extensions to Rock, Paper, Scissors, my friends and I were wondering whether it’s possible to have an even-move version. It doesn’t seem … Continue reading

Leave a comment