The first trial game T1 of the 2009 CAT Market Design Tournament will start at 1400 British Summer Time (1300 GMT) on Monday 15 June 2009. You can watch the progress of the game from this webpage.
Preparations are currently underway for the Trial Games of the 2009 TAC Market Design Tournament, aka the CAT Game, due to take place next week. If you have already registered for the 2009 CAT Tournament, but you have not yet received connection information from the CAT Gamemester, please contact me as soon as possible.
Technorati Tags: CAT Game, CAT Tournament
Economist John Kay has an interesting article in the FT about the Global Crisis in Economic Theory. Marketers have long held to the view that marketing only exists to the extent that the assumptions of economics are false. Nice to see an economist agreeing with this.
“Since the 1970s economists have been engaged in a grand project. The project’s objective is that macroeconomics should have microeconomic foundations. In everyday language, that means that what we say about big policy issues – growth and inflation, boom and bust – should be grounded in the study of individual behaviour. Put like that, the project sounds obviously desirable, even essential. I confess I was long seduced by it.
Most economists would claim that the project has been a success. But the criteria are the self-referential criteria of modern academic life. The greatest compliment you can now pay an economic argument is to say it is rigorous. Today’s macroeconomic models are certainly that.
But policymakers and the public at large are, rightly, not interested in whether models are rigorous. They are interested in whether the models are useful and illuminating – and these rigorous models do not score well here.
Indeed, at an early stage of the project Robert Lucas, one of its principal architects, who received the Nobel prize for his contributions, developed what is known as the Lucas critique. He argued that ordinary standards of statistical validity should not be applied to the project’s predictions. According to his colleague Thomas Sargent, Lucas was concerned that such tests rejected “too many really good models”.
Economists, like physicists, have been searching for a theory of everything. If there were to be such an economic theory, there is really only one candidate, based on extreme rationality and market efficiency. Any other theory would have to account for the evolution of individual beliefs and the advance of human knowledge, and no one imagines that there could be a single theory of all human behaviour. Not quite no one: a few deranged practitioners of the project believe that their theory really does account for all human behaviour, and that concepts such as goodness, beauty and truth are sloppy sociological constructs.
But these people discredit themselves by opening their mouths. That people respond rationally to incentives, and that market prices incorporate information about the world, are not terrible assumptions. But they are not universal truths either. Much of what creates profit opportunities and causes instability in the global economy results from the failure of these assumptions. Herd behaviour, asset mispricing and grossly imperfect information have led us to where we are today.”
(Hat tip: SP)
The program for the 2009 Trading Agent Design and Analysis Workshop (TADA 2009) is now published, here. The workshop will include several presentations of research arising from the CAT Market Design Tournament. Early registration closes on 15 May 2009.
Technorati Tags: TADA 2009
The documents describing the 2009 CAT Market Design Tournament have been updated. They are available from the CAT Tournament page, here.
The JCAT tournament software platform has also been revised, with the new version (v. 0.13), now available from the CAT sourceforge page, here.
Technorati Tags: CAT Market Design Tournament, JCAT
COBOL turns 50 this year, but has the energy and enthusiasm of a someone much younger. Perhaps 50 is the new 30, or even the new 17!
“But are companies really relying on a half-century-old invention to handle large chunks of their dealings? Mike Madden, development service manager with the catalogue-shopping firm JD Williams, believes so.
Better known for its online stores, such as Simply Be and Fifty Plus, Madden says JD Williams remains highly dependent on Cobol applications. “We have a huge commitment to Cobol,” he says. “About 50% of our mainframe systems use it.”
Why? “Simple - we haven’t found anything faster than Cobol for batch-processing,” Madden says. “We use other languages, such as Java, for customer-facing websites, but Cobol is for order processing. The code matches business logic, unlike other languages.”
Technorati Tags: COBOL
Alec Wilkinson has a nice profile in the 30 March 2009 edition of The New Yorker magazine of poker-meister Chris Ferguson. The son of a mathematician mother and a game-theorist father, Ferguson seems particularly adept at applying game theory to poker.
I had not realized until reading this article that, despite the threats of lawmakers and politicians, the legal position for online poker in the US is so strong. Arguably, the various laws against online gambling only preclude gambling on “games of chance”, or betting by spectators. Online players of poker, a game of skill and not chance, are thus exempt, at least by one interpretation of the various laws. That neither US State nor Federal Governments have yet prosecuted people for playing or facilitating online poker would seem to support this interpretation.
Technorati Tags: Chris Ferguson, online poker, poker
Jonathan Jarvis has a nice animation of the Global Financial Crisis, here (video about 11 minutes duration).
A collection of 27 different visualizations and animations of the GFC can be found here.
Technorati Tags: Global Financial Crisis