How Game Theory Helped Improve New York City’s High School Application Process
As a yearly ritual, eight graders from New York City middle schools begin the process of applying for a spot in high schools. While the actual application process may take days of hard work, the sorting algorithm that assigns students to high schools only takes a fraction of a second for each individual. However, there seems […]
The Prisoner’s Dilemma and Multiplayer Games
Despite the growing worries about the influence of video games in the modern world, one cannot deny the major impact they’ve had on industry and culture. In tandem with the increasing popularity of mass-multiplayer online games, much concern has arisen in particular towards the concept of hacking and/or glitching a game in order to gain […]
Snapchat “Best Friends”
We all know what Snapchat is, but for those who are not very familiar with it, Snapchat is a video messaging application where users can take photos, record videos, add text and drawings, and send them to other users. In this mobile application, there exists a feature which displays your “best friends”. The way your best friends are […]
Braess’s Paradox in Epidemic Game: Better Condition Results in Less Payoff
Hai-Feng Zhang, Zimo Yang, Zhi-Xi Wu, Bing-Hong Wang, and Tao Zhou studied evolutionary epidemics coupled with human behaviors as a game. Individual humans are their players with 3 strategies: vaccination, self-protection, and laissez faire. They may change strategies at the beginning of each new season of epidemic spreading, basing this decision on the aggregate decisions […]
Doctor-patient relationship; Prisoner’s Dilemma
In a study by a team of physicians and a mathematician this year in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation, game theory was used to describe the interactions between doctors and patients today as our countries health care system is shifting. Currently, our health care system is implementing policies that evaluates doctors partly based on patient […]
Price-Match Guarantees and Game Theory
This Economist article brings a very unique and interesting point of view of how price-matching tactics used by supermarkets, which on the surface appear to be just a way of satisfying customers, can actually bring much benefit to the supermarkets by keeping profit margins high. The traditional price wars among supermarkets can be viewed through […]
Winning the Fantasy Football Draft with Game Theory
I always remember that time of the year when all my guy friends are raving about the Fantasy Football draft. My dinner conversations would be filled with who got the first draft and the updated scores after each day. Even though I never participated in this draft, I can see why so many people are […]
Weak ties are really just weak
Weak ties, it seems, do not have as much “strength” as we assume, at least for job hunting. Let’s back up a bit. “The strength of weak ties”, postulated Granovetter in his seminal 1973 paper, are immense and (until then) widely underestimated. We normally have “strong ties” with people like family and close friends with whom we have […]
Petri Nets
So far in this course, we’ve thought of networks mainly as connected collections of things of the same type: social networks of people connected by friendships, disease/contagion networks of people connected by physical contact, networks of intersections connected by roads, etc. Graph theory gave us a good way of thinking about these networks by providing […]
Analysis of transnational advocacy networks
The article mainly introduces the structure and formation of transnational advocacy networks, which are international-scale networks organized to promote “causes, principled ideas and norms”. Nowadays, these networks are especially important in debates over human rights, the environment, women, infant health and indigenous peoples. The large-scale transnational advocacy networks emerge from networks in smaller scale. Major […]
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