Quantitative and formal analysis of international relations, comparative politics, and American politics.
A simple simulator for the twice weekly lottery: It is really hard to win the Mega Millions lottery. So hard that it can be difficult to comprehend what long odds confront its players. Why not try for free on this Mega Millions lottery simulator? You'll be able to try the same numbers over and over, … Read more
Tom Ricks at Foreign Policy has a brief article discussing questions posed to General Petraeus by Republican senators recently. Just a few thoughts on this issue…
Michael Flynn is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Kansas State University. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Binghamton University in 2013. His research focuses on the political economy of foreign policy with a specific focus on security cooperation and military deployments.
This is a topic that I’ll probably expand on later, but I was just reading an article discussing the role of Hamid Karzai’s brother in the present Afghan conflict. This article gets at an issue that I’ve thought about before. From the FP article cited above: But he could not exist without the support of coalition … Read more
Joshua Keating at Foreign Policy had a piece posted a couple of days ago that just caught my eye. It basically talks about the current status of terrorist training camps and what the itinerary for the typical attendee entails. It's pretty brief, but I think it covers some interesting subject matter. And let me preface … Read more
A simple relink from Orgtheory. William Spaniel, a graduate student at the University of Rochester (and a fellow TCG player) has a set of 26 clips explaining basic game theory on youtube. The list can be found here. I've already passed this on to another instructor who will be using this for an online course … Read more
A friend outside of political science linked me this post asking if we deal with bargaining models in political science. For those of you who are not in the know, one of the mainstays of contemporary International Relations game theory treats war as a bargaining process between states. As such, the author argues that traditional … Read more
It appears that one cannot go wrong with something as simple as a two-by-two table (produced in Excel) in a blog post. The three biggest traffic generating posts that I have personally done involve the Prisoner’s Dilemma (it is about a 2×2 game!) that received link love from Freakonomics, the Dark Knight Ferry game which … Read more
A News Lite article reporting on academic research indicates that WoW makes the world more scientific: They looked at a random sample of nearly 2,000 discussion posts to see what types of conversations took place, such as social bantering versus problem-solving, that classified as scientific reasoning. It was concluded that the forum and game-based learning could supplement textbooks and … Read more
If you have not already seen The Dark Knight, then you should read this post at a later time as to avoid spoilers after the jump. Otherwise, follow the jump for a game theoretic discussion derived from the movie that has already broken two box office records for both best midnight opening and top first day revenue. I personally enjoyed the movie immensely, but that discussion does not follow.
So, officially, consider this a spoiler alert for what follows.
Michael A. Allen is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Boise State University. His research focuses on international conflict, military alliances, and quantitative methods in international relations and comparative politics.
What’s a way to make online shopping more appealing to game theorists? Make it a lottery, of course! For 10 USD, SomethingStore.com will send you . . . something. According to their website, the company will send you something randomly chosen from their inventory. They make no guarantee of suitability or value, or even that … Read more