The Society of Undergraduate Math Students here at Rochester asked me to give an elementary talk on quantum game theory last week. I’m posting video of the first (non-technical) half of that talk. I’ll post the second (more technical) half after I get around to editing out the embarrassing mistake I made near the very end.

Click the lower right corner of the video window to expand to full screen.

Possibly better viewing here.

If you’re wondering what I’m up to, click on the picture.

With a hat tip to Kenneth Anderson at the Volokh Conspiracy:

Golden Balls is a British game show where players decide, in secret, whether to adopt a strategy of “Split” or “Steal”. In this episode, they face the following payoffs (in British pounds):

This is almost, but not quite a classic Prisoner’s Dilemma situation. (To make it a true Prisoner’s Dilemma, where stealing always beats splitting, you could change the lower-right hand box to “1 each” instead of “0 each”.) As in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, you can never go wrong by stealing — though you can go horribly wrong when the other guy steals, so it makes sense to reach a no-stealing agreement — and then to violate it.

In other words you’d pretty much expect homo economicus to steal every time. But this game is far more interesting than the usual textbook version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, because it’s played by real people for real money and they negotiate in public for half a minute before they choose their strategies. In principle, the negotiation shouldn’t change anything (unless the players come to care about each other, or about the way they’re perceived by the audience). But in this episode, the negotiation took an unexpected turn.

Continue reading ‘Best Negotiator Ever’