- What choices did Allais present in his 1953 thought experiment, and why did they contradict expected utility theory?
- Why was the Allais paradox largely ignored by mainstream economists for two decades?
- How did the Allais paradox contribute to the foundations of behavioural economics?
Game Theory
The mathematics of strategic decision-making.
- What did Coase's 1960 paper argue about the assignment of legal rights and bargaining outcomes?
- What did Becker's 1968 paper on crime argue about how offenders make decisions?
- What is a Nash equilibrium, in plain terms, and why does it apply to situations like auctions and traffic routing?
- How did John Harsanyi extend Nash's framework to games of incomplete information?
- What is subgame perfection, the concept Reinhard Selten introduced to game theory?
- How did Nash's schizophrenia affect the decades between his 1950 dissertation and his 1994 Nobel Prize?
- What does Yao's minimax theorem prove about randomised algorithms?
- What concepts did Schelling introduce in The Strategy of Conflict that shaped nuclear deterrence theory?
- What does it mean for information to be 'common knowledge' in Aumann's formalization?
- How does the theory of repeated games explain cooperation between self-interested parties?
- What defines a Nash equilibrium in a strategic interaction?
- How has the Nash equilibrium concept been applied outside of pure mathematics?
- What happened to John Nash in the days surrounding his death in 2015?
- Why did Thaler argue that departures from rationality are systematic rather than random noise?
- How does the game-theoretic model determine when a rational gossiper should lie rather than tell the truth?