Comment on Why is so difficult to organize a strike
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 9 hours agoWhat? Players acting rationally is one of the core assumptions of game theory. Sure there are some models that attempt to amount for irrationality, but the conclusions are obviously much less definitive.
It can’t really be any other way, perfectly rational actors are predictable in a mathematical way. Irrational actors are irrational in many different ways. One irrational actor might betray a fellow prisoner purely out of spite, another might refuse to speak purely out of a sense of loyalty. Another might make a decision compulsively without any strategy at all.
Irrational players cannot be analyzed mathematically. You cannot find a dominant strategy playing against irrational players, at least not a non-trivial one. Sure you can try to analyze them, but then you’ve left math behind and have wandered into psychology or sociology.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
You clearly have not studied game theory, as you are talking out of your ass. Go pick up a textbook and learn something.
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 6 hours ago
Sure, I can only go off what I’ve read. Would you like to recommend a textbook which goes into making predictions when playing a game with irrational players?
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 24 minutes ago
Any mathematical textbook will do it. Try Springer.
It’s quite simple really. Games in game theory are represented with a payoff matrix which shows the utility for each player. Pure strategies are defined as rows or columns in the payoff matrix. The math of game theory doesn’t care about why a player chooses a particular strategy, only its payoff.
I would define a purely rational player at minimum as one chooses a dominant strategy, when one is available. You’re free to expand that to mixed strategies and games where (strong or weakly) dominant strategies do not exist. Irrational players would be anyone who is otherwise not a rational player.
This isn’t very interesting in basic game theory. It becomes a lot more relevant in cooperative game theory, which can have more than 2 players and players forming coalitions.