What game theory tells us about politics and society

A professor in MIT’s Department of Economics, he deploys game theory to illuminate observed behavior across a range of political and social institutions. Wolitzky builds models concerning war and international affairs, labor relations, networks, technology adoption, and more.

Take “Cycles of Conflict,” which appeared in the American Economic Review in 2014, co-authored with colleague Daron Acemoglu. As the paper notes, analysts have observed that misperception and distrust have led to violence and warfare in many geopolitical situations — Uganda, Kenya, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and more. Indeed, as Acemoglu and Wolitzky point out, it was also the explanation Thucydides offered for the origins of the Peloponnesian War.

In any case, fears of inevitable conflict can lead to pre-emptive warfare. But how do such situations de-escalate?

These types of coherent models can play an important role in the intellectual ecosystem by organizing and illuminating messy sets of  empirical data. And Wolitzky is determined to model large-scale events, not just micro-level individual decisions.

Wolitzky says the “collegial” atmosphere in the MIT Department of Economics is very important for his work. But some of his key insights are due to quiet reflection.

Sometimes, Wolitzky develops models that refer to one sphere of life, such as politics, and later realizes that parts of them apply to something else entirely. The “Cycles of Conflict” model fed into a new paper he has authored alone, “Learning from Others’ Outcomes,” forthcoming from the American Economic Review, which is about technology adoption.

 “It’s interesting to see the diversity of things students have ended up working on, as you might imagine,” Wolitzky says. “Different students work on models of strategic communication, or the economics of Bitcoin — it’s been all over the place.”

 “The norms here get passed down from generation to generation,” he concludes.

Ref: http://news.mit.edu/2018/game-theory-politics-alexander-wolitzky-1204