Experiments: Game Theory

Follow-up to To ensure that you are honest… from Midgley, Christopher - Pointless twaddle and meaningless diatribes

Realised I could model the previous two cases of product purchase as games. So let’s do that.

Game 1:

1. You make a bid.
2. A price is randomly generated.
3. If the price is below your bid, you pay the price and get the item; otherwise you pay nothing (and don’t get the item).

Model as a game:

• Price to play the game is X
• You consider the product worth Y
• We assume the RNG creates numbers between 1 and 100 inclusive.
• X% of the time, you make , where i is the number generated minus 1.
• (100-X)% of the time, you make X.
• Your expected reward is one hundredth of .
• For payoff we subtract the bid.

At 0, we make nothing. At 100, we make 49.5+Y-X. Our maximum here occurs at X=Y+1/2 which, as we’re limited to integer solutions, still returns the same result.

Game 2:

1. You make a bid.
2. A price is randomly generated.
3. If the price is below your bid, you pay your bid and get the item; otherwise you pay nothing (and don’t get the item).

Model as a game:

• Price to play the game is X
• You consider the product worth Y
• We assume the RNG creates numbers between 1 and 100 inclusive.
• X% of the time, you make .
• (100-X)% of the time, you make X.
• Your expected reward is one hundredth of .
• For payoff we subtract the bid.

At 0, we make nothing. At 100, we make Y-X. At Y=X, we make X, which is our best.

So in conclusion we have that both have the same maxima, but the former has a higher payoff, which I suppose you’d expect.

Christopher Midgley : 15 Jun 2012 09:49 |  Tags: Experiment Maths |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem