game theory (thread 2)

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

[was:  Islam and Democracy: The Lesson from Turkey]

I wrote:
> As I noted, GT doesn't (usually?) take individual
> tastes, ideologies, etc. as endogenously determined
> by the social structure or game.

Sabri writes:

Exactly.

At least, the Nash Equilibrium Version of it does not.

If someone asked me what the most important aspect/issue of/with
economics/econometrics is, I would say without hesitation that it is
"endogeneity". Heterogeneity among individuals and associated with that the
so-called state-dependence (history as well as geography dependence) which
are important dimensions of "endogeneity" are absent from the "classical"
game theory, whatever "classical" means. I don't think if Michael Perelman
and I played the Prisoners' Dilemma Game between the two of us, we would
have ended up playing the Nash Equilibrium.

Also, Nash was a paranoid-schizophrenic not because of Game Theory but Game
Theory, at least, its Nash Version, is paranoid-schizophrenic because of
Nash's psychology.

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the "endogeneity of tastes" assumption in GT and neoclassical theory does indeed reflect Western-style individualism (what many Westerners might call the _only_ kind of individualism). For some reason, no-one ever wants to drop the assumption. For one effort, see my paper at http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine/hlr/HLR.pdf. 
Jim Devine