PennEduTech

This is my first official post on the Penn Engaging Students through Technology blog so I’d like to quickly introduce myself.  My name is Erin Murphy and I work for a group at Wharton Computing called the Learning Lab.  Each year the Learning Lab receives proposals from Wharton professors to develop web-based applications that extend the reach of learning in the classroom.  Some of these applications would fall under the category of simulations that allow students to engage in real-world challenges without assuming the real-world risk (e.g., The Online Trading and Investment Simulator allows students to experiment with different trading methods without losing real money). 

Through my experience with the simulations, I’ve come to realize that game theory in general is a particularly useful concept to understand and can be applied to different segments of life that one would not ordinarily associate with game theory.  In fact, I’ve been following a blog online (Mind Your Decisions blog) that is entirely dedicated to game theory and how it can be found in interesting places.  In this particular post from several months ago, the author details how game theory played a role in significant events like the financial crisis all the way to more trivial daily activities like waiting for the bus in the morning.  It is also being used to predict political events – see Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on TED.com using game theory to predict the future of Iran. 

Technology (especially simulations) is great at capturing game theories because they often deal with the actions/interactions/and negotiations of two or more players in a closed system.  As Bruce Bueno de Mesquita mentions in his TED talk, computers successfully keep track of these actions/interactions/and negotiations much better than people and we can then analyze the data to predict a player’s future actions.  On that note, I’d like to discuss two of the most frequently used game theory types in Learning Lab applications.

• Tragedy of the Commons:  The notion of tragedy of the commons developed from an article of the same title written by Garrett Hardin in the journal Science in 1968.  “The article describes a dilemma in which multiple individuals acting independently in their own self-interest can ultimately destroy a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long term interest for this to happen”(Wikipedia, 2009).  The tragedy of the commons scenario can be used to demonstrate the effects of any group’s actions on a limited resource in a closed system from specific things like oil or TUNA to more complex resources like the environment.  
• Prisoner’s Dilemma:  “A game frequently displayed in television police dramas. Two partners in crime are separated into separate rooms at the police station and given a similar deal. If one implicates the other, he may go free while the other receives a life in prison. If neither implicates the other, both are given moderate sentences, and if both implicate the other, the sentences for both are severe. Each player has a dominant strategy to implicate the other, and thus in equilibrium each receives a harsh punishment, but both would be better off if each remained silent. In a repeated or iterated prisoner’s dilemma, cooperation may be sustained through trigger strategies such as tit for tat” (GameTheory.net, 2009).

For more information on game theories, check out gametheory.net.