Are you sponge worthy?

In an episode of the television sitcom Seinfeld, Elaine Benes’s favorite contraceptive sponge is taken off the market. She scours pharmacies to stock up, but her supply is now finite, so she must “reevaluate her whole screening process.” Every time she dates a new man, she has to consider whether he is “spongeworthy.”

When Elaine uses a sponge, Dixit says, she is forfeiting the option to have it available when an even better man comes along. He developed a mathematical model to quantify this concept of spongeworthiness many years ago, but kept quiet because it seemed inappropriate at the time. “I hope that my advanced age now exempts me from the constraints of political correctness,” Dixit wrote after retiring from teaching earlier this year

Can Spain beat the Dutch playing Dutch Football

“I am Dutch,” Cruyff said last week to El Periódico in Spain, where he lives. “But I will always defend the football Spain play.”

That is an easy transition for him because the soccer Spain plays is downright Dutch, and it can trace its roots to Cruyff. At the height of his playing career in 1973, Cruyff joined Barcelona and played there five years, winning the Spanish championship and the Spanish cup. He had even greater success when he coached Barcelona from 1988 to 1996, winning four league titles and the 1992 European Cup.

He also helped establish methods used at the club’s acclaimed youth academy, La Masia, where a third of the current Spanish team learned a style of play that was neither Spanish nor Dutch, but which is internationally appealing and very effective....

The Spanish style is based on the Dutch system of “total football,” developed at the Amsterdam club Ajax, where Cruyff learned the game. It requires every player on the field to be a playmaker, as a dribbler or passer, depending on what the situation requires.

Open sections of the field were not gaps to be traversed with long passes or frantic runs forward; rather, they were areas to mount an organized, well-fortified attack with keen passing and combination play. That is the sort of play Spain has used here to dominate possession on its way to the final after losing to Switzerland, 1-0, in its opening match.

“I think Spain is the country playing the best football in the past few years,” Netherlands Coach Bert van Marwijk said Saturday. “I’ve been the coach of the national squad for two years now, and during that time, it has crossed my mind that I would love to play Spain, and now it is happening.”

He added: “Both teams have their own style, and they do resemble each other. Right now, Spain has executed better.”

-A Dutch Great Helped Transform Spain’s Game

Schelling Quote- The Very Basics of Game Theory

"If I go downstairs to investigate a noise at night, with a gun in my hand, and find myself face to face with a burglar who has a gun in his hand, there is a danger of an outcome that neither of us desires. Even if he prefers to just leave quietly, and I wish him to, there is danger that he may think I want to shoot, and shoot first."

via David Henderson

The Lesson: 'in thinking through various actions you might take to have an effect on B, ask yourself how you would respond to such actions if you were B. In other words, put yourself in the other person's shoes, not to get a touchy, feely, we're-all-in-this together Kumbaya moment, but to come up with your most-realistic analysis'

Elinor Ostrum in South Asia

In the south Asian context, the key contribution by Elinor Ostrom, along with other scholars (Shivakoti and Ostrom 2002) has been to provide effective empirical understanding of the performance of different types of irrigation institutional arrangements, along with a theoretical understanding of how these systems work. She demonstrated the importance of involving farmer-users in the design and management of irrigation systems for successful local resource management policies in Nepal. Work in Asia had amply demonstrated that large, centralised and essentially top-down government management systems tended to underperform, with lower rates of return on investment than systems where incentives to engineers were aligned to those of local farmer-users with their active participation (Wade 1982; Lam 1995; Ostrom 2002). Several Indian scholars have been inspired by Ostrom’s work to study issues of collective action and governance of common property resources, and to search for alternative frameworks for understanding how best to manage such resources which are often vital to the very existence of rural livelihoods in India. A large body of literature exists in India on the contributions of common property resources or CPRs as they are commonly labelled. The National Sample Survey too devoted a special round (54th round) to the de jure and de facto existence and contributions of CPRs in India, particularly in terms of their provisioning services such as fuel-wood, fodder and non-timber forest products from forests. Her work and that following hers in south Asia and elsewhere has found that institutions for collective action can emerge in rural societies characterised by inequality, prior history and poor implementation of centrally determined legal structures. Village society was often able to accept some amount of inequality, overlook prior history and agree on common norms of behaviour to solve the problems of the commons.


Several scholars from south Asia benefited from visiting the “Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis”, which Ostrom established in 1973, along with her husband Vincent, a political scientist at the Indiana University Bloomington. Over time, the Workshop has turned out to be an extraordinary forum for productive deliberations from evolving associations of students and professors thereby producing a wealth of theory, empirical studies and experiments at the interface of political economy, social anthropology, economics, political science, and policy studies thereby further enriching the interdisciplinary discourse of collective action. Quite a few of the research students of Ostrom have visited Indian institutes (Institute of Economic Growth (IEG) in Delhi, being one of the prominent ones) and have worked with Indian scholars, thereby resulting in further exchanges. Ostrom herself has visited academic institutions in India a few times, the most recent visit being at the IEG in October 2008, providing the researchers the intellectual space to discuss and debate design issues in moving from models of governance of local to global commons.

Source: EPW

Related:


Elinor Ostrom and the Future of Economics
Vincent and Elinor Ostrom and public ownership of natural resources

Podcast: Elinor Ostrom Checks In
A Case Study for Elinor Ostrom's 2009 Nobel Speech?

The Significance of Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel

Books vs Articles: The Flaying of Elinor Ostrom;

Her important book that was key to her prize, Governing the Commons, 1990, has been riduculed because presumably unlike an article in the AER, it did not go through a "peer review" process

Elinor Ostrom on the Market, the State, and the Third Sector

The Ostrom Nobel


An institutional economics prize
Ostrom and Williamson get the Riksbank

What this Nobel prize means
Rethinking Institutional Analysis: Interviews with Vincent and Elinor Ostrom

Elinor Ostrom and the well-governed commons

Elinor Ostrom - Nobel Laureate 2009
Ostrom on institutions: complex solutions can spontaneously emerge

Reality bites
Congratulations to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson;

Congratulations go out to Elinor Ostrom, co-author of The Samaritan’s Dilemma: The Political Economy of Development Aid (OUP, 2005) and Oliver Williamson, author of The Mechanisms of Governance (OUP, 1999), Organization Theory: From Chester Barnard to the Present and Beyond, 2nd Edition (OUP, 1995), and The Nature of the Firm: Origins, Evolution, and Development (OUP, 1993).

See the world like Elinor Ostrom

To see the world more like Elinor Ostrom is to be guided less by ideology and more by the contours of the situation — to use the right institutional tool for the job. “[N]ational governments,” Ostrom tells us, “are too small to govern the global commons and too big to handle smaller scale problems.”

Skyhooks versus Cranes: The Nobel Prize for Elinor Ostrom;

To understand BOTH why we don’t need police officers in some cases AND why police officers don’t follow the rules in other cases, we have to expand models of human preferences to include a contingent taste for punishing others. In reaching this conclusion, she arrived at a point similar to that reached by Avner Greif (whom the Nobel committee correctly cites.)

Princeton’s Dixit Discusses Nobel for Ostrom, Williamson: Audio

G-20 and John Nash

Essential task for G20 leaders is a cinema trip to see 'A Beautiful Mind' by Mohamed A El-Erian and Mike Spence;

The US is in the grips of an accelerating process of employment destruction, with over half of the 4.4m jobs lost in the last four of the 14 consecutive months of contraction. Accordingly, its policymakers are pressing other countries to internationalise a massive fiscal stimulus effort. In doing so, they also recognise that the return to the stimulus will be much higher if the financial system and housing are stabilised, because they too are part of the negative feedback dynamics.

Eurozone countries generally agree on the importance of fiscal stimulus. Yet they are not surprisingly uncomfortable with what the US is pressing for. The recession in the region is less advanced, the tolerance for economic pain is higher, and the cross-border leakages are significant.

In these European countries, the focus instead is on long-standing concerns about abuses in the financial sector which are seen to have provided both the fuel and the spark for today's global crisis. Accordingly, policymakers stress financial regulatory reform as the key components of crisis management and crisis prevention.

At one level, emerging economies do not disagree with the US and Europe. Yet, when it comes to their central revealed preference, the onus is to stress a third element: the need to counter trade protectionism and ensure the appropriate flows of international capital. Brazil's President Lula's forcefully advocated this position when he visited President Obama in the Oval Office earlier this month.

Here is where John Nash comes in. The differing onus reflects the fact that various countries start with diverse "dominant strategies" consistent with differences in their initial conditions, be they economic, political or social. Moreover, there is merit in all three. Yet, as the concept and incentive structure of the "prisoners' dilemma" illustrates, the world will undoubtedly end up with a sub-optimal outcome if each party to the solution were to follow just its dominant strategy.

Given the accelerating nature of the crisis, a Nash equilibrium of this type would go down in history as a notable lost opportunity, if not a disastrous mistake similar to what occurred in the international conference of 1933. Accordingly, and again using Nash's framework, the world needs to find a way of "imposing" a more "cooperative solution." What is needed domestically and globally is a coordinated solution that changes the payoffs and hence the virulence of the downward dynamics.

The two traditional ways to get there are ineffective in today's global economy. The IMF needs to address long-standing representation, governance and expertise deficits before it can restore its position at the centre of the international monetary system. The alternative of single country leadership requires a weakened US to step up to the plate more forcefully and, critically, in a manner that recognises that persuasion will work better than lecturing.

So, are we doomed to end up in a sub-optimal non-cooperative Nash equilibrium? The probability is high but it is not inevitable. There is still time for more meaningful cooperation among countries based on the simultaneous, rather than sequential, pursuit of the three priorities: real economy stimulus, financial system stabilisation and openness.

More Game Theory from Middle East

In early summer 1995, a few months before his assassination, prime minister Yitzhak Rabin asked Jordan's King Hussein to approach Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein on his behalf and arrange a joint visit by Rabin and Hussein to Baghdad, according to Nigel Ashton, author of "King Hussein: A political Life" (Yale University Press).

Ashton, a senior lecturer at the London School of Economics who is close to the Hashemite royal family, was given rare access to Hussein's private archives. In his Hussein biography, Ashton writes that when handed a secret letter by a Jordanian official, "Saddam did not rule out direct contacts with Rabin," but was reluctant "to work through lower-level intermediaries." No further moves on the Israel-Iraq initiative were recorded before Rabin's murder that November....

Aston calls the Rabin request for Hussein's intervention with Saddam "a bold and remarkable secret initiative." Saddam, a bitter enemy of Israel, had launched some 40 surface-to-surface missiles at it in 1991, partly in retaliation for the 1981 bombing of the Osiraq nuclear reactor.

Rabin reasoned that opening up relations with Iraq would increase pressure on Syrian leader Hafez Assad, Saddam's enemy, to cut a peace deal with Israel. Perhaps even more importantly, Rabin saw Iran, Iraq's arch-rival, as posing a more dangerous threat to Israel, with Iran bent on a nuclear-weapons program and Iraq under an international-sanctions and monitoring regime after the 1991 war.

-British author: Rabin asked Jordan to arrange secret visit with Saddam

Photo caption contest

Israelis watched smoke rise above the northern Gaza Strip

The Traffic Guru

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us

Which one do you think is the American cover and which is the British cover?.

Top Reformer goes at it again

Moments after President Bush appeared at the Rose Garden to say that the Pentagon would begin a humanitarian aid mission to support Georgia, Mr. Saakashvili was on the phone with a Western reporter, talking fast. “This is a turning point,” he said. Soon he appeared on national television, his tousled hair combed back flat and wearing a freshly pressed suit, assuring his country that the worst had passed.

No matter that Russian troops were 30 miles away, milling on the road outside the capital, meeting no resistance. Mr. Saakashvili was in cocky form in an interview later in the evening with reporters, expounding on Nazi propaganda, Orwell and the film “Dr. Strangelove.”

“Russians should see that this is not a demoralized, you know, nervous panicking capital that is just scared,” he said. “Shops are open. There are no lines for gas stations. Prices are not up.”

He added, “We will fight to the end, until the last Russian soldier leaves Georgian soil and this country is not going to be brought to the knees anymore. We are not surrendering, no matter what.”

Mr. Saakashvili’s latest show of bravado came only a day after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that she and a special State Department envoy had explicitly and repeatedly warned him not to take any military action against Georgian separatists that might provoke Russia, cautioning that the United States was not prepared to back him militarily if he did. He also appeared to exaggerate the Pentagon’s planned relief operation, making it seem larger and further developed than it was.

“We already saw U.S. Air Force landing in Georgia despite Russians controlling the airspace,” he said, after a C-17 had touched down. “And we will see U.S. military ships entering Georgian ports despite Russians blocking it. That we will see.” He added, “These will be serious military ships.”

Q & A on Georgia

Was the Top Reformer stupid?

Interesting observations on the Russia and Georgia war from Belgravia Dispatch;

Which brings me to a fifth point, and perhaps a more proximate causal factor contributing to this explosion of misfortune in Georgia, namely, that of stupidity, or at least, severe miscalculation. Saakashvili, an apparently quite idealistic 40 year-old former NY lawyer, seems to have erred too much in thinking that giddy summitry with Western big-wigs might pay dividends (or too his far too excited involvement in the Iraq adventure which, incidentally, looks to be coming to a quite precipitous end) but unfortunately, insufficiently appreciated the disastrous waning in U.S. power these past years, despite his constant hankering for NATO membership (which a resurgent Russia will never accept regardless of Kosovo or whatever else, best I can tell), and thus has fallen short with regard to better appreciating a variable which would have been more apropos, namely, a harsh dose of realpolitik. And this despite Putin having warned Saakashvili rather pointedly: "On April 21, Mr. Saakashvili called the Russian leader to demand that he reverse the decision [possible Russian recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia]. He reminded Mr. Putin that the West had taken Georgia’s side in the dispute. And Mr. Putin, according to several of Mr. Saakashvili’s associates, shot back with a suggestion about where they could put their statements. Mr. Saakashvili, prudent for once, shied from uttering the exact wording, but said that Mr. Putin had used “extremely offensive language,” and had repeated the expression several times." Permit me to be less prudent than Mr. Saakashvili, who appears perhaps to be a poor prioritizer of where to be prudent and where not. Mr. Putin told him that he could (and excuse the crudity) stick American and Western European assurances regarding the territorial disputes in question up his rear end, I suspect, and I'm afraid that's not a too inaccurate assessment, if a bit biting and brusque (save if McCain trumps Obama and decides to ride the NATO cavalry up from Kabul to Tbilisi a few months hence--perhaps on the back of some more WaPo interventionist rhapsodizing--devoid of the merest smidgen of appreciation for historical context and subtlety, leading to another toweringly idiotic 'Washington consensus' of some sort).

NYT's The Lede has more coverage.

Coming Monday! Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on Iran

Coming Monday on Econ Talk! Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on Iran and Threats to U.S. Security

Related;
The Economist who can predict the future

The New York University political science professor has developed a computerized game theory model that predicts the future of many business and political negotiations and also figures out ways to influence the outcome. Two independent evaluations, one by academics and one by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, have both shown that about 90 percent of his predictions have been accurate. Most recently, he has used his mathematical tools to offer approaches for handling the growing nuclear crisis with Iran...

Former CIA analyst Stanley Feder says that he has used Bueno de Mesquita's model well over a thousand times since the early 1980s to make predictions about specific policies. Like others, he has found it to be more than 90 percent accurate. In situations where predictions of the model differed from experts' predictions, the model always turned out to be correct.

"I'm always stunned that it works so well," Bueno de Mesquita says. "This 90 percent is not my assessment."

The main reason that the model generates more reliable predictions than experts do is that "the computer doesn't get bored, it doesn't get tired, and it doesn't forget," he says. In the analysis of nuclear technology development in Iran, for example, experts identified 80 relevant players. Because no individual can keep track of all the possible interactions between so many players, human analysts focus on five or six key players. The lesser players may not have a lot of power, Buena de Mesquita says, but they tend to be knowledgeable enough to influence how key decision-makers understand the issues. His model can keep track of those influences when a human can't.

"Given expert input of data for the variables for such a model, it would not surprise me in the least to see that it would perform well," says Branislav L. Slantchev, a political scientist and game theorist at the University of California at San Diego. Predictions based on game theory can fail in a context where people don't act rationally, but in Buena de Mesquita's work, Slantchev says, rational action mostly means that the players are promoting their own perceived interests as best they can, something humans tend to do.

Can you deter a suicide terrorist?

Is 4Ds (Deterrence, Dissuasion, Defense and Defeat) the best way to deal with terrorism?



Related;
START

Suicide Bombing Fact of the Day

• More than 85 percent of female suicide terrorists since 1981 committed their attacks on behalf of secular organizations; many grew up in Christian and Hindu families. Further, Islamist groups commonly discourage and only grudgingly accept female suicide attackers. At the start of the second intifada in 2000, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, claimed: “A woman martyr is problematic for Muslim society. A man who recruits a woman is breaking Islamic law.” Hamas actually rejected Darin Abu Eisheh, the second Palestinian female attacker, who carried out her 2002 bombing on behalf of the secular Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

• For one, 95 percent of female suicide attacks occurred within the context of a military campaign against foreign occupying forces, suggesting that, at a macro level, the main strategic logic is to create or maintain territorial sovereignty for their ethnic group

• All secular organizations that employ suicide bombings have used female attackers early and often. For instance, 76 percent of attackers from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey have been women, as have 66 percent of those from Chechen separatist groups, 45 percent of the Syrian Socialist National Party’s and a quarter of those from the Tamil Tigers.

-Behind the Woman Behind the Bomb

Related;
A Sociobiological View of Palestinian Suicide Bombers;

Suicide bombings have been one of the major hurdles to the Israeli-Palestinian peace and over the past four years, acts of terrorism have killed 958 Israelis and maimed thousands of others. In America, the typical explanations for this behavior center around three themes: poverty, lack of education and mental illness. The limited amount of research that exists on suicide bombers, however, suggests that these assumptions are wrong. It appears that suicide terrorists have no appreciable mental disorders and demographic data shows that they tend to be no less educated and no poorer than the surrounding population. Given the gravity of the situation and the inaccuracy of current explanations, I propose that alternative methods be used to assess the behavior of Palestinian suicide terrorists. With this paper, I combine sociobiology (a.k.a. evolutionary psychology), memetics and game theory to help explain the emergence of Palestinian suicide terrorism and to analyze the motives of the individual bombers. Bringing together research from these different fields, it becomes clear that suicide bombers act as a result of a confluence of generally adaptive psychological traits that are brought together in a maladaptive way by the peculiarities of the Palestinian situation. Suicide bombers are motivated by religious factors, particularly the notions of martyrdom and jihad, and other social factors including groupishness, the obedience to authority, xenophobia, reciprocity, the inclusive fitness of relatives and the protection of territory. Furthermore, the frequency and motives of male and female suicide bombers seems to be in keeping with their evolved sex strategies and gender roles. While these adaptations may have been beneficial in the ancestral environment, I show that combined today under the auspices of violent terrorist organizations has led to the emergence of suicide bombers.

Why Israel should attack Iran

A great Israeli economist explains why war is rational;


But one Israeli columnist writes;

For or against bombardment, Israel never thinks in terms of beyond tomorrow. It acts like a person who puts buckets in a house with a leaky roof instead of thoroughly fixing the roof. So we bombard Iran, and even if it is successful and we do not have to pay a heavy price for it - a dubious scenario - what happens then? What will happen when Egypt wants a bomb? Will we bomb again? And Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Iraq? And perhaps Hezbollah has some "dirty bomb" or other? And will we "allow" Turkey to go nuclear? Will we bombard and bombard, and live forever by bombardment?

And a minister, says alternatives to attack on Iran running out

Using Bombs to Stave Off War

Iran’s leaders would do well to rethink their gamble and suspend their nuclear program. Bar this, the best they could hope for is that Israel’s conventional air assault will destroy their nuclear facilities. To be sure, this would mean thousands of Iranian casualties and international humiliation. But the alternative is an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland. Some Iranians may believe that this is a worthwhile gamble if the prospect is Israel’s demise. But most Iranians probably don’t.

For Your Comments; What do you think are the odds of Israel attacking Iran before the end of this year.

Assorted

The Dark Knight and Game Theory

The Joker’s Trap

Chris Blattman On Writing reading list

Are We a Nation of Financial Illiterates?

Deterring Suicide Bombers

Ask an Agricultural Economist

What Is the Most Racist City in America?

Do Cell-Tower Climbers Have the Nation’s Deadliest Job?

China paper

David Friedman, Barack Obama, and the Game of Telephone

Question for teachers: How do you nudge students to work harder?

Iranian Revolutionary Guards sent for Photoshop training

For more see The Lede

Long live the Choice Architects of the World

As all women who have ever shared a toilet with a man can attest, men can be especially spacey when it comes to their, er, aim. In the privacy of a home, that may be a mere annoyance. But, in a busy airport restroom used by throngs of travelers each day, the unpleasant effects of bad aim can add up rather quickly. Enter an ingenious economist who worked for Schiphol International Airport in Amsterdam. His idea was to etch an image of a black house fly onto the bowls of the airport’s urinals, just to the left of the drain. The result: Spillage declined 80 percent. It turns out that, if you give men a target, they can’t help but aim at it.

21

Kaplan, Muse of Film `21,' Uses Blackjack Theory at Work

Bill Kaplan, chief executive officer of FreshAddress Inc., and a co-founder of the blackjack team upon which the recent movie ``21'' was based, talks with Bloomberg's Tom Keene about the film, parallels between his life and the movie, and the application of blackjack game theory in business.

Logistics of a Communion

New York gets ready for the Pope's visit;

Among the profound — and mundane — questions they are confronting: How do 530 priests and deacons give communion to 57,000 people in 14 minutes?

Mostly Behavioral Economics

The value of a coin or banknote depends on its familiarity;

To check this result was not caused by some prejudice in favour of paper money and against coinage, Dr Alter and Dr Oppenheimer repeated the experiment offering either two single dollar bills or a single two-dollar bill. Like dollar coins, two-dollar bills are rarely found in circulation. The second set of results was virtually the same as the first. And when the study was conducted a third time with a real dollar bill and a subtly doctored version that had had, among other things, George Washington's head reversed, the results were, again, nearly the same. People, it seems, literally value familiarity.

Whether this observation has wider significance is unclear, but it may. Familiarity takes time to build up. It may have been unfamiliarity with the currency itself, rather than with its face value, which caused price gouging (or, at least, allegations of price gouging) when the euro was introduced. With that in mind, it might be wise for America's Federal Reserve to watch retail prices carefully when it introduces a new series of banknotes in August. With money, it seems, it is not familiarity, but unfamiliarity that breeds contempt.

To Act, or Not to Act: That Is the Question;

According to Ofer H. Azar, a lecturer in the School of Management at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, inaction may often be a prudent choice in situations where most of us feel compelled to do something.

Mr. Azar studied high-stakes decision-making—not in the boardroom, but on the soccer field, where he collected data on the attempts of professional goalies to block penalty kicks. Regularly faced with huge incentives to block penalty kicks, goalies offer a great proxy for people who routinely make quick, high-pressure decisions. Mr. Azar hoped to see just how rationally people respond to such situations. Surprisingly, he found that goalies facing penalty kicks tended to let their emotions dictate their actions—often leading to detrimental outcomes.

Make Your Predictions: The Next Big Political Scandal

Do Hamburgers Cause Crime?

They’re horrid and useless. Why do pennies persist?

Game theory helps to explain the pervasive abuse of drugs in cycling, baseball and other sports

How Much Does a Free iPhone Update Cost?

Space Shuttle Processing