Predicting human behaviour: the cooperative equilibrium theory Seminar

Over the last sixty years it has been realised that Nash's theoretical assumption of full rationality and selfishness make poor and sometimes totally wrong predictions of human behaviour. In this talk I'll describe a new paradigm, called cooperative equilibrium theory, that puts together human tendency to cooperate and human altruism into a formal mathematical construction. This model is shown (1) to explain numerous experimental findings that are not explained by the standard economic models and (2) to make reasonably accurate predictions of population average behaviour. Time permitting I will be also talking about a work in progress with N. Jennings, M. Polukarov, and M. Venanzi, where we extend the cooperative equilibrium theory to some iterated games and show that predictions get even closer to experimental data as the number of iterations increases.