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Backward Reasoning Over Decision Trees — LessWrong

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Game theory is the study of how rational actors interact to pursue incentives. It starts with the same questionable premises as economics: that everyone behaves rationally, that everyone is purely self-interested1, and that desires can be exactly quantified - and uses them to investigate situations of conflict and cooperation. Here we will begin with some fairly obvious points about decision trees, but by the end we will have the tools necessary to explain a somewhat surprising finding: that giving a US president the additional power of line-item veto may in many cases make the president less able to enact her policies. Starting at the beginning: The basic unit of game theory is the choice. Rational agents make choices in order to maximize their utility, which is sort of like a measure of how happy they are. In a one-person game, your choices affect yourself and maybe the natural environment, but nobody else. These are pretty simple to deal with: Here we visualize a choice as a branchi

x Backward Reasoning Over Decision Trees — LessWrong Introduction to Game Theory Game Theory Frontpage 174 Backward Reasoning Over Decision Trees by Scott Alexander 30th Jun 2012 5 min read 58 174 Game theory is the study of how rational actors interact to pursue incentives. It starts with the same questionable premises as economics: that everyone behaves rationally, that everyone is purely self-interested1, and that desires can be exactly quantified - and uses them to investigate situations of conflict and cooperation. Here we will begin with some fairly obvious points about decision trees, b

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