Posted: Mar 01, 2010 6:21 am
crank wrote:
Good points, Mr.S., my post fairly inline with yours, though you say things with an eloquence and a sound of authority I'll never manage.
It's not that hard to do; all you have to do is talk shit, but then also believe the shit you're talking!
crank wrote:You can't emphasize enough how fascinating some of the experiments economists are doing these days, and often rather amusing. One of my favorites that has been replicated with Macaque Monkeys is the fair split test. Take two people, offer one $100 dollars on the condition that he offer to split it with the other, and that the other accept the split. A rational agent would accept a $1 split as he gains for zero effort, a human, with strong sense of fairness, won't accept offers anywhere near that low (can't remember the actual results). These types of tests are beginning to discern the deep psychologies of our drives and motivations, the basis for what moves individual economic agents and global markets.
Ah, I remember hearing about an experiment recently where a human plays against a computer, and basically they just decide on how much the computer (who they think is another person) gets. In the end, they found that humans would tend to short change their opponent, even at their own expense (so instead of giving themselves and the other person 4 points, they'd choose to take 3 points and only give 1 point to their opponent - the computer). They were really odd results, but I'll have to find the paper for the details.