Simple form of Double Morton (the 3-people tennis court example) is an obscure but arguably important candidate. Cousin of battle of sexes. You could call it polyamory battle. Ht for pointing this one out to me years ago.
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Despite dumpster fire and category error confusions, this thread is actually working as intended.
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Replying to @vgr
I think the Coin-matching game (the confidence game) fits the criteria.
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They are classes of phenomenology that may or may not be amenable to modeling as games. For example, the scene in A Beautiful Mind where Nash figures out how to get partners for a group by ignoring the prettiest girl is a model of a status dynamics situation.
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Replying to @vgr
Social status games/signalling
(or is that not considered game theory?)
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Yeah this is a fun bunnytrail. I once did such a model for PD using kinship as a parameter to create a spectrum from pure cooperation to pure adversarial. If PD payoff matrix is P, consider the game defined by P+ λP’... you get fun moving-equilibrium behavior as you vary λ
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Replying to @christophewllms and @vgr
If you’re trying to map out foundational games, it would be interesting to lay out which hyperparameters tie them together. Small changes in incentives near a boundary on the game map can drive large structural differences.
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🤔
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Replying to @vgr
Sorry if this was already in the replies or doesn't meet exactly what you're looking for but:
-Stag Hunt (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stag_hunt) is an interesting variant of Prisoner's Dilemma
-not sure if "mother sauce", but one of my faves is El Farol Bar problem (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Farol_)
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There’s so many derivatives and interesting degeneracies this really needs a sort of class hierarchy tree with 5-9 phylla
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There is good raw material in this thread for someone who wants to write a modern intro essay to game theory from a kind of ethnographic salience perspective rather than a textbook perspective.
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I just pointed a friend to the Dixit/Nalebuff strategy book which is the best example of what I am thinking of, but it is unfortunately really old/dated (1993). That’s what prompted this thread.
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It feels like game theory is used backwards, as a class of math problems that have applications. I prefer to think of it as a schema for organizing social phenomenology with a minimalist set of triage models. If you can’t find a model that fits, you have to actually think.
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When I was younger the distinction between zero-sum and non-zero-sum seemed profound to me. Now it strikes me as a high-modernist red herring that gas been overloaded into the philosophy equivalent of factory farmed junk food.
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To snowclone a Michael Pollan phrase, game theory used as analysis results in “processed metaphysics-like substances”
Game theory used to organize field observations otoh is interesting. But to do that you have to appreciate variety rather than Nash everything together with PD.
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Game theory may have jumped the shark when that guy wrote that mega thread “time for some game theory” in 2016. It might be impossible for a formalized subject to recover from that kind of muddied thinking abuse.
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Replying to
I don't think I really understand this thread but the only model people need to know about in game theory is six sigma. In short: people are never the problem. The system is the problem and the nature of the problem is always the same: communication breakdown caused by low trust.
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