Behavioral Game Theory

Labour leader Ed Milliband hit the headlines this week with his plans to freeze energy prices if elected into power in the 2015 UK general election. The response was pretty fervent. But can a price cap work?    The microeconomics textbook says that price caps are almost always a bad idea. To understand why it is interesting to see how labour defended the plan. Or, more properly, I should say how labour did not defend the plan. When questioned about the merits of the price freeze every shadow minister I heard reeled off a long list of reasons why the energy market is failing. What I never heard once was a minister argue that the price freeze will solve any of the market failures. And that's the problem, a price freeze will not solve any of the market failures! It will just make them worse.    For example, I heard several spokespmen bemoan the fact the market is dominated by only six firms. Put aside for the moment that six firms is more than enough for competition ...

For those unfamiliar with cottage holidays, the ideas is pretty simple: You rent a house, bungalow, or beach hut for a week or more, make yourself at home, relax and enjoy. What I want to explore is how different the experience feels in the UK and Denmark.       When you arrive at a cottage in the UK you can expect ample supply of toilet rolls, kitchen towels and logs for the fire. There will almost certainly be a library of books, CDs, DVDs and local maps for you to enjoy. Bed linen is provided free of charge. At one cottage we recently went to there was a complimentary bottle of wine.      Contrast this with Denmark. Here you have to pay for any electric, water and gas you use. Don't expect any toilet rolls or kitchen towels, let alone a complimentary bottle of wine. There's no library. Bed linen, or anything else, comes with an extra charge.       Which system would yo...

   It is apple season for another year. The trees in the village where I live are packed full of tasty, fresh, organic apples. And, most of them are going to be left to fall to the ground and rot! Which I think is a great waste. I also think it is a great example of the sunk cost fallacy in action.     Here's the issue: Consider someone called Mark who goes out to the supermarket and buys some apples. He will almost certainly eat those apples and go out of his way to not waste them. Mark, however, ignores the apples growing in his garden and does not think twice about letting them go to waste. Why does Mark save the apples he bought and not the apples  growing in his garden?     You might say it is a difference in quality; but, the apples in my garden are easily as tasty as those in my local supermarket. You might say it is the difficulty of harvesting the apples; but, it takes seconds for me to harvest 20 apples from my g...

In recent work with Amrish Patel we model giving to charity using a signalling game. With this approach a person is assumed to give to charity in order to signal some desirable trait about herself such as generosity or wealth. To many this approach seems quite a cynical one. It seemingly paints a picture of very strategic giving. Do people not give to charity because they want to make the world a better place?       What I want to try and convince you of here is that a signalling game approach actually paints a nice picture of giving - strategic, but not overly cynical.       Here is how a simple signalling game works: There are two types of people - generous and not-generous. The generous want to make the world a better place. The not-generous do not care. Society likes generous people. It likes them enough that it is willing to reward them in same way. This could be through e...

A ring that once belonged to Jane Austen came up for auction recently and was bought by US singer Kelly Clarkson for £150,000. The UK government has, however, subsequently put a ban on the singer taking the ring out of the country . The Culture Minister said 'I hope that a UK buyer comes forward so this simple but elegant ring can be saved for the nation.'       This is clearly the kind of policy that will split opinion. Some are going to think its important to save our heritage, and some will think it stupid to stop the sale of a ring worn by an author who died nearly 200 years ago. What does amuse me, however, is that just about every spokesperson I have heard criticising the policy appeals to economic theory to back up their case. Listening to them talk you could easily get the impression that hard-headed economic logic leads to only one conclusion - sell the ring. This is wrong!       The ...

I have finally got around to reading Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow . It is a fantastic read. It brilliantly sets out how Kahneman and Tversky revolutionized the way we think about human judgement and decision making. But, here's the question I was left asking myself - why has the work of Kahneman and Tversky had so little impact in economics? That question might sound bizarre given that Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for Economics (Tversky had died). As far as I can see, however, the insights provided by Kahneman and Tversky have largely been ignored. So, what's gone wrong?         In his book Kahneman points to prospect theory as one idea economists have endorsed. True enough, their paper on prospect theory is one of the most cited papers in economics. Cites, however, are different to real impact. And very, very little research in economics has properly applied prospect theory. Indeed, given that the original paper is a pretty t...

It is the weekend of the British Open Golf Championship. And yesterday there was a fair amount of discussion about slow play. Slow play is annoying in golf because one player taking their time holds up everybody else on the course. The referees have the power to counteract this by putting a player on the clock. Which basically means the player will be timed and penalized for taking too long. Yesterday, the referees put lots of players on the clock and penalized Japanese golfer Hideki Matsuyama. A similar thing happened at this years Masters Championship where 14 year old Chinese Golfer Guan Tianlang was penalized .       What interested me about the slow play discussion was the reaction of the players and commentators. All were in agreement that play had been to slow and that 'something needs to be done about it'. But mention a name, such as Matsuyama, and all were also in agreement that 'he was treated very harshly'. That sounds contradictory. There were only 40...