Modern macro models offer insights into the outcomes of adopting entire policy regimes, but in reality, policymakers are rarely required to make such broad-ranging policy decisions. This column suggests how theoretical and applied microeconomics can be used to develop a framework for modern macroeconomic policymaking, and demonstrates how game-theoretic principles could be used to make series of sequential policy decisions. While this approach requires large amounts of data, it would allow academic macroeconomists to refocus on important policy questions.
Strategic thinking is intrinsic to societal expectations in adulthood, but the ability to think strategically develops in childhood and adolescence. This columns studies how children learn to think strategically. The results show that strategic behaviour is multifaceted, and depends on a network of interacting abilities that develop gradually. Understanding how the development of these underlying abilities impacts the development of strategic thinking is important to assess how children and adolescents react in their own environments.
Our intro courses fail to reflect the dramatic advances in economics – concerning information problems and strategic interactions, for example – since Samuelson’s paradigm-setting 1948 textbook. Missing, too, is any sustained engagement with new problems we now confront and on which economics has important insights for public policy – climate change, innovation, instability and growing inequality amongst them. This column introduces a free online interactive text – now used as the standard intro at UCL, Sciences Po, and Toulouse School of Economics – which responds.
Classical models suggest that shifts in the balance of power can lead to conflict, where the established power has the incentive to trigger war to deter the threat to its dominance. This column argues that this changes if international trade is taken into account. Industrialisation requires the import of natural resources, potentially leading a smaller nation to trigger war either against a resource-rich country or the incumbent nation. The model can help explain the US-Japanese conflict of 1941 and Hitler’s invasion of Poland, and has implications for US-Chinese relations today.
Thomas Schelling, game theorist and co-recipient of the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, passed away in December 2016 at the age of 95. This column explores how his lack of concern with professional methodological norms allowed him to generate new knowledge with great freedom, and to make innovations in method that may end up being even more significant than his specific insights into economic and social life.
The late Thomas Schelling’s 1960 classic, The Strategy of Conflict, opened up new vistas in the then emergent field of game theory. This personal tribute by a longstanding friend and colleague describes how Schelling’s creative and playful mind, his incredible breadth of interests, and his unparalleled mastery of strategic analysis opened up a new world of intellectual possibilities.
The reasons why a country would comply with international standards of transparency in the face of sizeable returns in the tax haven business are unclear. This column highlights fundamental coordination problems in the fight against offshore secrecy regimes and their implications for optimal policies, and explores whether the fight will be successful or not.
Reinhard Selten, co-recipient of the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, passed away in August. This column outlines the intellectual life and career of a pioneering analyst of strategic interaction of both fully rational players (game theory) and real human beings with ‘bounded rationality’ (experimental economics). Selten called himself a ‘methodological dualist’, making a sharp distinction between normative game theory and descriptive theories of social and economic interaction. Nobody else has made such substantial and important contributions to both lines of research.
A key task for economists is predicting how markets will respond to complex changes in environment. This column discusses recent empirical developments that allow for a deeper understanding of such market dynamics. Game theory has informed conditional pricing models that take account of products marketed and their production costs. Likewise, dynamic models of productive efficiency allow for analyses of the role of market structure in inducing competitive efficiencies.
Lloyd Shapley, game theorist and co-recipient of the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, passed away in March. This column, by the economist with whom he shared the Nobel, outlines Shapley’s intellectual life and career, which was among the most fertile of the 20th century. Shapley made fundamental contributions to the analysis of both cooperative and non-cooperative games. Some of his foundational ideas have led to the study of matching markets and to the thriving branch of practical economics known as ‘market design’.
John Nash passed away this week. This column pays tribute to a mathematician whose contributions to economics are enormously influential.
The rules of sports are complex and involve the interaction of many self-interested agents. This column uses game theory to analyse the rules of the qualification tournament in the UEFA zone for the 2014 FIFA World Cup. It shows that cases could arise where a team would have to avoid winning to advance. It also lays out the general intuition for thinking about how rules misalign incentives in sport tournaments.
Avinash Dixit of Princeton University talks to Romesh Vaitilingam about game theory in economics: its emergence and development after the Second World War, particularly from the 1970s onwards; its applications in business, public policy and daily life; and the future research agenda. The interview was recorded in Princeton in August 2009.