‘Learning and Equilibrium in Games’ was the subject of this year’s Marshall Lecture at the Faculty of Economics, delivered by Harvard Professor Drew Fudenberg.
‘Learning and Equilibrium in Games’ was the subject of this year’s Marshall Lecture at the Faculty of Economics, delivered by Harvard Professor Drew Fudenberg.
Fudenberg one of the world’s leading game theorists, talked about when we might expect observed play in strategic interactions to approximate the Nash notion of equilibrium. Game theory attempts to mathematically capture behaviour in strategic situations, in which an individual’s success in making choices depends on the choices of others.
Nash equilibrium is used to predict behaviour in game theory, taken from the name of John Forbes Nash Jr (Nobel Prize 1994), whose life and work was featured in the film ‘A Beautiful Mind’.
Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta who is the Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics said: "This year's Marshall Lectures by one of the world's outstanding economists, on the evolution of beliefs among economic actors, was one of the highlights of a year at the University of Cambridge where we have been celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's masterpiece.”
Fudenberg discussed how his perception of the concept of equilibrium could provide insights into the issues ranging from genomic imprinting in biology and the durability of Babylonian King Hammurabi’s laws (which were one of the first written codes of law in recorded history), to economic matters such as the political economy of tax policy and US monetary policy and inflation in the 1970s and 1980s.
The Faculty of Economics has run the Marshall Lectures, in honour of the economist Alfred Marshall, annually since 1932.
The lectures aim to reflect Alfred Marshall’s vision for economics education in Cambridge: “To increase the number of those, whom Cambridge sends out into the world with cool heads but warm hearts, to discover how far it is possible to open up to all the material means of a refined and noble life”.
Professor Fudenberg’s Marshall Lecture may be viewed online via the Faculty of Economics website, linked above right.
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