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Category Archives: Rationality
Which Coalition to Form (2)?
Yair Tauman (This post is a continuation of this previous post.) Aumann and Myerson proposed that if political and ideological matters are put aside, the party forming the coalition would (or should) prefer to form the coalition in which its own power (according … Continue reading
Which Coalition?
The problem. OK, we had an election and have a new parliament with 120 members. The president has asked the leader of one party to form a coalition. (This has not happened yet in the Israeli election but it will happen soon.) Such … Continue reading
Basic Open Research and Failed Institutions – Imagine
Imagine if in the last ten years before the collapse, the huge failed financial and insurance institutions had had independent research units devoted to doing basic, open, and critical research on matters of relevance to the business, ethics, and future of these institutions. Might it have made a small … Continue reading
Majority Rules! – The Story of Achnai’s Oven
It is election day in Israel, and an opportunity to tell the beautiful and moving story of Achnai’s oven. Towards the end of the first century, a few decades after the big Jewish rebellion against the Romans, the sages of the … Continue reading
Posted in Rationality
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The Retaliation Game
We have two players playing in turns. Each player can decide to stop in which case the game is stopped and the two players can go on with their lives, or to act. The player that acts gains and … Continue reading
Debates
Debates are fascinating human activities that are a mixture of logic, strategy, and show. Not everybody shares this fascination. The German author Emil Ludwig considered debates to be the death of conversation. Jonathan Swift regarded debates as the worst … Continue reading
Thomas Bayes and Probability
How can we assign probabilities in cases of uncertainty? And what is the nature of probabilities, to start with? And what is the rational mechanism for making a choice under uncertainty? Thomas Bayes lived in the eighteenth century. Bayes’ famous … Continue reading
Would you decide the election if you could?
One mental experiment I am fond of asking people (usually before elections) is this: Suppose that just a minute before the votes are counted you can change the outcome of the election (say, the identity of the winner, or even … Continue reading
Posted in Rationality
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The Prisoner’s Dilemma, Sympathy, and Yaari’s Challenge
Correlation and Cooperation In our spring school devoted to Arrow’s economics, Menahem Yaari gave a talk entitled “correlation and cooperation.” It was about games as a model of people’s behavior, and Yaari made the following points: It is an empirical fact … Continue reading
Posted in Economics, Games, Philosophy, Rationality
Tagged Cooperation, Correlation, Prisoner dilemma
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