Behavioral Game Theory

Every four years, as the Winter Olympics hits town, a sizable proportion of the British population falls in love with the sport of curling. And that offers the chance to look afresh at game theory's 'first big result' - the Minimax Theorem.         Curling is often called 'chess on ice'. But, that analogy only goes so far because chess is a game of complete information and curling is not: If a chess player intends to move a bishop to E4 then we can be pretty sure he will move it to E4. He is not going to mistakenly move it to D3, and a gust of wind is not going to move it F5. Curling, by contrast, involves both skill and luck. Skill is required to put the stone where it was intended. And luck is needed because debris on the ice can deflect a stone, and so on. So, while chess is a pure game of strategy, curling is a game of strategy, skill and luck.            The fact that chess is a pure a game of strategy makes it relatively ...

The last few decades have seen a huge rise in testing and performance monitoring within the English education system. The latest installment is a call for testing of four year olds when they enter the school system. The objectives of such policies are fine enough - this one, for example, will supposedly allow teaching to be more tailored to students needs. There are, however, two big problems with testing in schools. In short these are that: (i) Tests are often poor measures of what is being assessed. (ii) Tests change incentives. Let me elaborate on each of these problems in turn.        How can you measure ability? Exams and tests provide a simple to administer measure. They provide, however, a very, very noisy measure - in other words they often give the wrong impression. And the earlier one does testing the more noisy it is surely going to be because children naturally develop at different speeds. The fact, though, that tests can be wrong is not, in itself, a...