Category: Games
One Game Machine Per Child
Ofer Malamud and
Cristian Pop-Eleches look at the effects of a program that gave poor households a voucher to purchase a computer. (The program was Romanian but the results may hold lessons for similar programs around the world.) Households with incomes directly below a cutoff level were given a voucher while households with incomes directly above the cutoff were not. Thus, households which were very similar were treated differently and this lets the authors use a regression discontinuity design that makes their results credible as representing a causal effect. The results of a regression discontinuity design are also very easy to explain with figures.
The income cutoff is shown by the red line. Beginning at the top left we see that households with incomes just below the cutoff were much more likely to have a computer than households with incomes just above the cutoff – thus the voucher program has a big effect on computer ownership. The top right figure shows similarly that the voucher program increased computer usage since computers were used much more often in households with incomes just below the cutoff than in the non-eligible-for-voucher households with incomes just above the cutoff.
Now take at look at the figures below. The one on the left shows that the voucher program significantly increased the time spent playing computer games. The one on the right which looks at the effect of the voucher program on the use of computers for homework – well, the punch line is clear.
Not surprisingly, with all that game playing going on, the authors find that the voucher program actually resulted in a decline in grades although there was also some evidence for an increase in computer proficiency and perhaps some improvement in a cognitive test.
Hat tip to David Youngberg at the SeetheInvisibleHand.
Equality Shoes
Hint: The woman on the right has not got hers on yet. Hat tip Kottke.
Theory of optimal punishment, as applied to Haitian dominoes
Craig Stroup sends along the following photo:
That's one way to address the zero lower bound problem. Many other excellent photos can be found here.
Gender risk-aversion, using data from chess
Dan Houser sends me a link to this paper, by Christer Gerdes and Patrik Gränsmark:
This paper aims to measure differences in risk behavior among expert chess players. The study employs a panel data set on international chess with 1.4 million games recorded over a period of 11 years. The structure of the data set allows us to use individual fixed-effect estimations to control for aspects such as innate ability as well as other characteristics of the players. Most notably, the data contains an objective measure of individual playing strength, the so-called Elo rating. In line with previous research, we find that women are more risk-averse than men. A novel finding is that males choose more aggressive strategies when playing against female opponents even though such strategies reduce their winning probability.
I am pleased to see that studying chess data is suddenly a "trendy" way to do behavioral economics. Admittedly one is dealing with an unusual group of subjects. Yet the quality of the data is high and the stakes are usually high too. Computers can be used to judge the quality of moves.
Good sentences
"We originally wrote this article in Word, but then we converted it to Latex to make it look more like science."
The link is here. It is the best analysis of zombification I have seen to date. For the pointer I thank John Chilton.
If you could know only one statistic about an alien civilization
Adam asks:
If you were offered a true statistic about an alien civilization, but only one, what would it be?
How about the real rate of return on capital? The risk premium? The percentage of the population which dies in war each year? Those are what come to mind right away. What else? Ideally you might want a cognitive measure, but their performance on human IQ tests probably would not be useful information. How about "what percentage of our knowledge of mathematics do they also have?" Furthermore, I would not assume they "look like the aliens you see on TV" and would consider a biological statistic (which one?) which expressed what kind of life forms they would count as.
What would you choose?
Relations
The source article is here.
Haitian riddles
Ou bwa seche? (You give up?) The answers are:
- A table.
- Bread.
- It's not raining.
- A dog.
- Only one. After that the sack's not empty.
You'll find more Haitian riddles and proverbs here.
What are the odds that the best chess player in the world has never played chess?
The more general issues are how well the modern world allocates talent and how much exposure you need to something you eventually will be very good at.
My view is that people who are born into a reasonably good educational infrastructure get exposed repeatedly — albeit briefly — to lots of the activities which might intrigue them. If the activity is going to click with them, it has the chance. To borrow the initial example, most high schools and junior high schools have chess clubs and not just in the wealthiest countries. Virtually everyone is put in touch with math, music, kite-flying, poetry, and so on at relatively young ages.
The idea of taking an economics class in college, or picking up some economics literature, strikes most educated people at some point, even if they squash the notion like a bug. If there is some other Paul Samuelson-quality-would-have-been who didn't become an economist, perhaps he preferred some other avocation even more.
Billions of people are not exposed to quality economics, math, music, etc., but those people also don't have the nutrition, the education, the infrastructure, or whatever, to excel at world class levels. The infrastructure and the exposure come together and in that sense we keep on mining the pool of potential talent. (Their only modal scenario to #1 for these individuals is an entirely different life altogether; mere additional exposure won't do it.)
Ernest Bazanye is blogging from Uganda.
Some people get stuck in local genres, such as a brilliant Nigerian learning funk or rap, in his teen years, but not modern jazz and besides he can't find a Nigerian market for the latter in any case. These "specialization corners" are less of a problem for math or economics, although the unification of those areas is fraying with time.
Magnus Carlsen's father suggested that if he hadn't had an older sister, he might not have taken up the game at all. Magnus was uninterested at ages four and five, but grew intrigued at age eight when he watched his father play chess with his older sister. I read this anecdote as suggesting he would have been exposed again to the game, one way or another, probably in school.
Two scenarios militate against my thesis. First, mistreated savants may not receive the necessary exposure to the activity. I am very much a believer in the potential productivity of mistreated savants. Still, I believe they often do best when not trying to be pure #1 in some commonly contested, measurable area but rather by filling unusual and hard to specify niches in a broader production process and benefiting from the division of labor to an especially high degree.
Second, a large number of children are placed on medication at early ages. This may not eliminate their exposure to an activity in the literal sense, but it may stop them from responding to potential interests.
In sum, I believe that the odds that "the best (modal) chess player in the world" has never played chess is well under fifty percent but probably above ten percent.
Christmas Game Theory
The lovely wife says the jewelry I bought her for Christmas has to be returned because "it's just too expensive!" Excellent. I get the credit without the credit bill!
What I will never reveal is how far I looked down the game tree before purchase.
Addendum: Do not try this at home. Without extensive knowledge of game theory and your spouse this strategy can be very dangerous to your finances, c.f. Thomas Schelling, brinksmanship.
Sadism Licence
Nie pozwalam!
Liberum veto (Latin for I freely forbid) was a parliamentary device in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It allowed any member of the Sejm to force an immediate end to the current session and nullify all legislation already passed at it by shouting Nie pozwalam! (Polish: I do not allow!).
Here is more.
Bad Scrabble strategy, from Alaska
I try not to blog Sarah Palin, but this passage, reproduced on Andrew Sullivan's blog, caught my interest for non-Palin reasons:
"Everybody in the family played Scrabble and took great pride in hoarding Ks and Qs and slapping them down in long, fancy words on triple-letter scores." — Going Rogue, p. 12.
Sullivan's reader objects that there is only one K and one Q but I think permissible to use the plural in this context, referring to general acts of hoarding over time.
My point is that this is bad Scrabble strategy. The way to do very well is to put down seven-letter words on bonus squares, thereby getting the fifty-point bonus for using all your letters and doubled or tripled at that. Such a strategy means maximizing one's holdings of S, R, E, T, O, A, and N, essentially, and dumping awkward letters which stand in the way. "ING" is a powerful combination. In addition, high frequency letters help you link up with other words running crossways, boosting your score further.
The astute MR reader will recognize here that we are dealing with portfolio theory, albeit where many assets are complements rather than near-perfect substitutes.
K doesn't mesh well with most other letters and so you should try to dump it quickly. Q is paralyzing unless you have a U to go with it. If you are happy because you could lay down "quit" on a double word score, for 26 points, I would say you are not a very ambitious Scrabble player, all the more if you hoarded letters and waited turns to do that. (You have some chance of "aliquot" or "quaeres" or "quinoas," but do you really expect to score "obloquy," "quassia," or "qigongs"?, keeping in mind that if you build upon an already-laid tile you need an eight-letter word with q to score the bonus.)
If this is her game of Scrabble, you can only imagine what her foreign policy would be like.
Correction: If you search inside the book, you will see that she is referring to the Scrabble strategies of her grandparents, not her own Scrabble strategies. They are the ones who cannot be trusted with U.S. foreign policy and it can also be said that she misses this chance to condemn their weak gaming strategies.
I thank Seth H. for the pointer.
How to flip a coin
Chris Blattman reports:
Using a high-speed camera that photographed people flipping coins,
the three researchers determined that a coin is more likely to land
facing the same side on which it started. If tails is facing up when
the coin is perched on your thumb, it is more likely to land tails up.How much more likely? At least 51 percent of the time, the
researchers claim, and possibly as much as 55 percent to 60 percent –
depending on the flipping motion of the individual.
The original research is here.
*The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws*
Many writers (including W.H. Auden, Georges Perec, Julian Mitchell, Julian Barnes, Ronald Harwood and Jonathan Raban) have been addicted to crossword puzzles, but I have never taken to them either. The hours of freedom from words are a relief to me, though of course I acknowledge that, paradoxically, I then seem to feel the need of words to try to analyse the nature of this freedom.
That's because writing is an illness. A chronic, incurable illness. I caught it by default when I was twenty-one, and I often wish I hadn't. It seemed to start off as therapy, but it became the illness that it set out to cure.
That is from the new Margaret Drabble book, which indeed is about her obsession with jigsaw puzzles. While I do not myself have an interest in jigsaw puzzles, or crosswords, I am nonetheless finding the book very interesting. It will baffle many of her traditional fans but that's probably for the better.