Microsoft Research Launches a Facebook Game Testing Classical Game Theory
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-readies-a-facebook-game-theory-lab/10803
Microsoft Research recently launched a Facebook game called Project Waterloo, where there are two players each having their own troops and a battlefield. As Facebook users play this game, Microsoft is able to view how people negotiate with each other and gain insight on their general behavioral actions in the presence of one another. Microsoft’s team is trying to test “the behavior of real people in game theoretic interaction in social networks” with hopes to obtain a great deal of insight on the accuracy of the predictions of game theory. Microsoft is also trying to launch a similar game to facilitate their research more directly, where people would interact with other users on Facebook while playing a range of negotiation, competition, and resource allocation games. Similar to Project Waterloo, Microsoft would gain visibility to each person’s strategic decisions, as well as the interactions between the people playing the game. Instead of gathering people in lab settings for these studies, participants now can sit in the comfort of their own home and play games while interacting with other users. Hopefully, this simulation will lead people to make decisions they would in real life and help provide us with new information on how people interact and negotiate with one another.
In this vast consumer driven market it will be up to Microsoft to successfully market and advertise these games in order to acquire a large sample of customers. If this happens, Microsoft should obtain a tremendous amount of data to help discover some analytical information on game theory. Project Waterloo should help determine whether or not an individual’s behavior is precisely the same as the predictions of classical game theory, which we have been learning in class. Just like Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World stresses, what we claim people’s behaviors to be are simply predictions based on the game theory and not definite outcomes. In the long run, Microsoft Research has the potential to provide a reasoning and theory that can enhance or better predict the interactions between people and how people negotiate. On the other hand, the result of this study can also portray that classical game theory is in fact how the large majority of people make decisions. For example, in our text book there is a network of four people, where B, C, and D are each connected to each other in a triangle and A is only connected to person B. In this situation, using the game theory, we would predict that if each person could only make one deal, B would make a deal with A and receive somewhere between 7/12 and 2/3 of the money; however, it is currently difficult to determine the exact amount B would receive. It is possible that we simply need to gather more information about the individuals to discover this number, but there is also a possibility that with the utilization of Microsoft’s Facebook games, this number could be determined the majority of the time.