Ara Rosenhyslop

Independent Research GT 2
15 Febuary 2018

Inteview
Daniel: Hello.

Ara: Hi this is Ara Rosenhyslop. May I speak to Daniel please?

Daniel: This is he.

Ara: Thank you for talking to me today, I would like to remind you that this call is being
recorded is this still ok?

Daniel: Ok.

Ara: As I said in my email I am interested in using game theory in geo political situations
specifically with North Korea, and I understand that you know more about the game theory
aspect.

Daniel: I know some about game theory it's not my main focus, but I have studied it. So why are
you thinking about game theory, I suppose I wanted to ask?

Ara: It seemed interesting.

Daniel: Ok

Daniel: Do you know much about game theory to start with?

Ara: Yes, I have been focused on the North Korea aspect, because I haven't been able to find a
lot of information on the game theory side of it. North Korea has also been more prevalent, but
i’m still trying to learn more about the game theory side of it.

Daniel: Sure, I mean I guess one thing to start with is you know to distinguish between
methodologies and substantive concerns. Game theory is first and foremost a methodology, its a
way of seeing things rather than a substantive area like the U.S. North Korea relation. Game
theory is more general and can be applied to many different situations
Ara: Thats what my understanding is, i’m trying to apply it to a situation, and this seemed like a
good and relevant situation to apply it to.

Daniel: It can be, the first thing to think about with game theory is game theory is distinguished
from an earlier technique called decision theory. In that game theory involves two or more actors
or players. So any time you are talking about game theory you are talking about multiple people,
countries, whatever taking action, that's what makes it a game. If you are talking about the
actions of just one group or person is taking you are talking about decision theory, which is
similar. So if you wanted to think about game theory, to think about it in terms of North Korea
you might think about it in terms of US relations to North Korea.

Ara: I see,

Daniel: Game theory is broadly a way of structuring theoretical arguments in terms of how
different players respond to each other and respond to decisions or what possible decisions other
sides could make, If you think about some of the classic examples of game theory, like are you
familiar with the prisoner's dilemma.

Ara: Yes, I understand a lot of how those work, and I guess that's one of my questions is how can
something like that be applied to a much larger issue?

Daniel: It isn't just sort of applied generally its applied to a more specific idea or question or
difficulty. It's like asking how could math or how would statistics be applied to something, those
are big fields, and can be applied a lot of different ways, that's true with Game theory. Game
theory often gives us insight when we consider the actions of several people that we didn't have
before. I brought up the prisoner's dilemma because it is an example of game theory, because
you have two people concerned with the actions of another person both end up choosing a worse
action. Because we're thinking of how each prisoner is thinking about the possible actions of
another prisoner that they end up doing something worse than they'd like to do. That's sort of
what game theory gets us a lot of times. How different groups will react based on the other
groups.

Ara: That makes sense. I wanted to specifically ask about you, and how and if you use game
theory and what you do?

Daniel: I don’t really use game theory at the moment.

Ara: Or how have you in the past?

Daniel: Game theory is pretty common these days in the social sciences or at least something not
called game theory, but called formal modeling. Making a mathematical model of theories you
want to discuss. I’m not as big a fan of it as other people. You need to know quite a bit about it
in the social sciences just because it's so common. I think sometimes it's not always helpful, but
it depends on the area and how much exactness and clarity you need to worry about with a theory

Ara: Ok

Daniel: So stuff i'm interested in. In corruption someone might create a game theoretic model
between asking for a bribe and paying a bribe, it's different players to try and get into this theory
with different forms of corruption.

Ara: Ok, that covers another one of my questions. Do you have any good examples of how game
theory has been used in any real life situations that you know of?

Daniel: The prisoner's dilemma is essentially a collective action problem its a problem of people
coordinating. There's example of this called the tragedy of the commons, have you heard of this?

Ara: I have heard of it, but did not quite understand it.

Daniel: Tragedy ofthe commons is basically the idea that there are things that are…, sort of a
famous example is there is a common area where people can send their sheep or cows to graze,
but if everyone sends all their animals there all the time they will chew all the grass, there will be
too many of them and eat it, so we teach that to people to just use a little bit. What we can learn
from a game theoretic perspective, is knowing that if everyone uses it all the time my best option
as a person with some cows to stay and use it as much as possible before everyone else uses it all
up. Essentially, we think a lot of things like the market as everyone pursues their own interests
things work out well. Collective action problems with game theory shows us that there are times
where everyone pursuing their own interests is actually much worse. Which also is applicable to
the prisoner's dilemma. Knowing that the other prisoner is likely to rat on me, I want to confess
even though both prisoners are better off if both don’t say anything. So game theory teaches us a
lot about these sort of collective action problems, the problems of getting everyone to work
together.

Ara: How is game theory used in real world situations?

Daniel: Thinking about serious problems it's used to come up with general theories about how
things work, and any sort of negotiation you need to take into account of so many idiosyncratic
factors that i don't know that a method like game theory specifically sheds light on it game
theory might tell something about negotiations generally which might be helpful but it's not
something I would generally apply to a specific negotiations.

Ara: That answers my next question, but do you have any real examples of game theory being
used in political situations.

Daniel: Not that come to mind no, that's not really how people think about it it's more that game
theory is used to try and understand why people do certain things broadly rather than than a
specific situation. That's how I always heard of it. I haven't really heard it being applied to super
specific situations. This is really my field though.

Ara: Do you know anything about predicting things with game theory to make predictions.

Daniel: You know, any statement about causation or behavior is somewhat predicting by nature
not more specifically than that, mostly what I do is studying social sciences. In the social
sciences we aren't mostly predicting things were mostly trying to explain causation one thing
causing another. This has a predictive quality to it, but it's not like generally trying to predict
specifically. For example something from my field would ask the question how would
government corruption affect voting. The general belief is that more corruption leads to people to
vote less. So this has a predictive quality you can they say based on that corruption decreases
voting. Generally in this science we are focused on the causal relationship. First and foremost. So
I don't know of any game theory being used to predict something except that it's useful to tell us
about how political parties position themselves that might be used to help inform a prediction of
how parties will shift later, but its not usually the first thing you study. For me pretty much
anything you read through social science literature you don't really find much about what will
happen in the future as much as explaining why things have happened in the pass, or why things
are connected to each other.

Ara: To go off of that, do you create models to model these behaviors and trends?

Daniel: Ya, a game theorized model is a model of human behavior . Also it's the study of human
behavior. Any game theory model is a model of this. A simple example of the prisoner's
dilemma. You have two prisoners that can either be quite or confess, and the game theorized
prediction for the outcome is that both will confess. That's a model of behavior, its saying I think
the other person will confess so i'm going to confess. That's essentially all game theory models.

Ara: Are there other fields that use game theory that you know of?
Daniel: Economics! That's a big one, most of the famous game theory people were economists,
Nash and another guy who just won a nobel prize in economics last year who did behaviour
economics. Economics is really the biggest field to apply game theory. Political science takes a
lot from other fields, like game theory and sociology.

Ara: Also with that, do you know any skills that are important that enable you to use game
theory and understand it better.

Daniel: You need to know some math, but essentially you are dealing with logic in a
mathematical form. Thats alot of how game theory was created Advanced game theory stuff
often uses calculs quite a bit, stuff that deals with continuous possibilities, instead of just A or B
you can do a whole range of things, those tend to require calculus to come up with any sort of
outputs in a model. So game theory is really based on math.

Ara: I, think that really answers all my questions, thank you very much for talking with me again
today.

Daniel: Ok!

Ara: Have a nice day.

Daniel: Yep, bye.

Reflection
I think the interview overall went well, and he had a lot of good answers to my questions. In the
future I will focus more heavily on a more specific topic, and ask follow up questions on that
topic. Other aspects of the interview I will change is reducing the amount of time I spend not
talking because I do not know what to say, and paying close attention to the answers the person I
am interviewing provides, so that I ask more intelligent follow up questions. Taking notes during
the interview could help to improve my ability to ask more precise follow up questions. The
most challenging aspect of the interview was finding someone that would agree to talk with me.
Another difficulty I encountered was finding someone with the expertise to answer my questions.