In the past week there have been several additional interesting posts to the class blog. At this point the number of new posts is small enough that we can briefly comment on each of them. There were two posts on game theory. amcoops245 discussed the need to use mixed strategies in playing poker. Poker is a more complex game than those we have analyzed in class, but the ideas of game theory can be applied to it. A good poker player does not play a pure strategy in choosing how to bet as this would eventually allow the other players to infer too much about the quality of the player’s hand from bets. Instead, good players bluff occasionally. klevine discusses how to interpret climate change negotiations as play of a repeated prisoner’s dilemma. Again this is a complex game. If the game had a definite ending time, then sustaining cooperative behavior would be difficult, or impossible, just as it is in the one-shot prisoner’s dilemma. But as the end of the negotiation is not specified in advance, cooperation is possible.

Several other posts discuss the use of network structure in various settings. jamesww noted how referrals in the real estate industry form triadic closure between the friend of client and the client’s realestate agent. sqi2 noted how medical researchers are using properties of networks of interactions between biochemical agents to better understand how to target drugs. Finally, pomegrenade used a network analysis to discuss protests against the Church of Scientology and church’s apparent understanding of influence in social networks.