Bio

Jim Lacey teaches economics and business at Hesser College in Manchester, New Hampshire. Before becoming a college professor, he worked in the high-tech sector at AT&T, Bell Labs, and Lucent. Jim’s PhD research was in postmodern economics and interdisciplinary social sciences. (Postmodern, in this context, means beyond the positivist prediction and control paradigm.)

Jim plans to use NKS as a way to model strategic behavior via game theory. He hopes to use his applied NKS work as a vehicle to introduce NKS thinking to MBA students, business practitioners, and the scholarly economics community.

Project: Win-Lose Graphs of Small Matrix Games with Enumerated/Deterministic Strategies

Within economics, game theory is the exploration of strategic interaction involving two or more players. (Players may be individuals, firms, or even nations.) Each player attempts to maximize its payoff (outcome) by making a strategic choice. The payoffs of players are often interdependent; that is, the strategy of one player determines the payoff of the other. Thus players may select strategies based on past results, typically the last payoff, or by looking further back. The strategies of the players and their resulting payoffs are captured in a payoff matrix.

This project will examine 2-person, 2-strategy games with payoffs from 0 to 3 using a set of m payoff matrices. Research questions are “Which strategies result in greater payoffs?” and “Do cycles or interesting patterns appear?” Analysis and interpretation of the result will examine the implications for strategic behavior.

Visualization of the project will be via tree diagrams that show the ranking of strategies by payoff.

Favorite Four-Color, Radius-1/2 Rule

Rule chosen: 7790000000

I selected this because it seemed the most interesting of my run, with colors coming in and out in non-regular patterns.