Teamwork makes the dream work

An interesting paper by Cooper and Kegel (2023) in AEJ: Microeconomics finds that using teams (rather then individuals) in the prisoner’s dilemma game is more likely to result in choosing to cooperate than would be the case if individuals playing each other. We compare behavior of two person teams with individuals in indefinitely repeated prisoner…

Shapley Value

  What is the Shapley Value?  The Shapley value determines the relative importance of different individuals within a cooperative game.  For instance, who is more important: the owner or the workers?  Without an owner supplying capital, there would be business to start.  Without workers to produce goods, there would be no output to sell.  Thus,…

Game Theory and the Talmud

Today is Friday.  Every Friday at sundown, the Sabbath (the day of rest) begins for the Jews.  Observant Jews spent most of Friday night and Saturday praying, reading the Torah and other scholarly works, socializing, and of course eating. Although the Talmud might seem to deal only with other-worldly matters, that is not always the…