Jonathan’s Card Has Ended

Penny Arcade, a comic that usually discusses video games and the video game industry, weighs in on Jonathan’s Card–apparently, homo economicus can gain utility by not only defecting and receiving the largest share possible, but also gains utility purely by gaming the experiment. Unfortunately, it appears the test has come to an end (Starbucks deactivated the card) due to abuse and apparent fraud in the experiment (perhaps Tycho-types have won).  The premise of the project was to have a publicly available Starbuck’s card that anyone could use. The card started with a balance and anyone with a smart phone could use Continue reading Jonathan’s Card Has Ended

Prisoner’s Dilemma Answers

I posted previously that Freakonomics was hosting a Prisoner’s Dilemma contest.  About a week ago they selected the top five answers and had a quick voting contest (comment democracy with 48 hours to decide the winner).  Since I am both currently attending one of the EITM summer programs and exercising my current mathematical knowledge by attempting to run a maximum likelihood estimation of a generalized Prisoner’s Dilemma model with a normally distributed cost function to the players for cooperation; it seemed like a good time to return to the post and evaluate the answers provided. Adding a pre-game to the Continue reading Prisoner’s Dilemma Answers