Math trek

Science News, July 19, 2008

What's Edgar Allan Poe got to do with game theory? Inspired by a game theory "riddle" in Poe's short story "The Purloined Letter," economists Kfir Eliaz and Ariel Rubinstein ran dozens of simple, even-and-odd guessing games, similar to a game described by Poe. They showed that Poe (and not game theory) was right in cases in which human psychology played an important role, but that when this element was minimized, game theory prevailed in predicting winners.

Julie J. Rehmeyer describes the study and its results and implications in a recent post of her weekly online column.

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COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning

 

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