SilasBarta comments on The continued misuse of the Prisoner's Dilemma - Less Wrong

29 Post author: SilasBarta 23 October 2009 03:48AM

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Comment author: SilasBarta 24 October 2009 12:19:18AM *  4 points [-]

He's aware that the mechanism by which Ashley won (being a lucky liar) is not the reason markets prevent collusion?

Then why is he teaching that as a demonstration of why markets prevent collusion? Kind of a strange way to go about it, don't you think?

Comment author: Wei_Dai 24 October 2009 01:41:55PM *  9 points [-]

The celebratory tone of the Freakanomics post is also pretty inexplicable. Why is he so happy that one student out of eight bid $0.05, when the model that he's teaching supposedly predicts that everyone bid $17.50? Either his model is horribly wrong, or the students haven't learned anything, or both...

Maybe this professor just doesn't spend much effort on his blog posts. Take a look at http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/why-my-students-dont-get-rebates where he uses the phrase "Pareto improvement" in a completely wrong way. Anyone who doesn't already know what it means will be misled, and those who do will be confused.