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Game Theory Behind Video Games

Starcraft: Brood War was a popular computer game that gained worldwide attention in the early 2000s as a highly competitive game, categorized as “real-time strategy” or RTS. In fact, this game was so popular in South Korea that many players competed professionally, landing endorsements, popularity, and monetary rewards, almost to the point that Starcraft was […]

Political Advertising: A Prisoner’s Dilemma

The American people are more unhappy with the government than they have been in many years.  A recent poll by Gallup has revealed that only 13 percent of Americans approve of Congress.  Although the approval rating of Congress is typically not very high, it was only at 32% since Gallup first began polling in 1974, […]

Advertisements: The hidden auctions

The study of auction theory may seem antiquated and unproductive. How useful is it to study crowds of rich individuals holding up signs to purchase wines and collector’s items? Can those really be that common? As it turns out, we are unwittingly part of hundreds of small scale auctions every day. And the object that […]

Paying for Gas With Positivity

        IBM Watson is a powerful tool for analyzing unstructured data. It uses natural language processing and machine learning to sift through large amounts of data while uncovering useful information. The automobile company, Chevrolet, used this platform to develop a web application that crunches data from social media networks to understand users’ […]

The paradox of Braess’ paradox

In class the other day, we learned about Braess’ paradox. This was discovered by a mathematician who found that adding a road to a congested road traffic network could actually increase overall travel time for that network’s Nash Equilibrium. This effect seemed incredibly counter-intuitive. Nonetheless, after researching it, the paradox has become only more confusing. […]

How to Reduce Costs in PPC (pay per click) Advertising Without Colluding

Companies in the same industry often bid for each others’ company adwords in search engines like Google. Let’s take Verizon and AT&T as hypothetical examples. Suppose that this game has two players Verizon and AT&T and has two strategies bid for the other company’s adwords and don’t bid for the other company’s adwords. Let the […]

Game Theory and PPC Marketing

1-800 Contacts has taken advantage of the internet advertising model of having companies pay every time a customer clicks on their ad (PPC), which has led to the US Federal Trade Commission suing them for anticompetitive behavior. They allegedly signed agreements with other sellers, which stated that the companies would not bid against one another […]

Characterizing people using Game Theory

Resource: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160915085719.htm This was a social experiment which characterized people 90% of it is participants into four personality types: optimistic, pessimistic, trusting and envious. The experiment was conducted using game theory in Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, and the findings were used to construct a computer algorithm to classify people on their behavior. The algorithm […]

Uber Everywhere

Uber’s push to be first to market in robotic taxis could become a reality as they release some of their automated driving taxis this week in Pittsburgh. The taxis will have a driver to take over in the case of an emergency which makes the transition to automated transportation from conventional means of getting around a blooming […]

Open Source as a Game

Sam Ramji, CEO of Cloud Foundry Foundation, makes a bold statement: no enterprise can compete into the future unless they embrace open source technology and business models. He relates this notion to game theory, positive-sum vs. zero-sum games. The numbers of zero-sum businesses are diminishing as more companies move to positive-sum open source models. This […]

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