Nash Meets Feynman

Those of you who haven't seen "A Beautiful Mind" might not get it. Butif you have (or if you know Nash's work), it's funny.

In case you didn't know, in addition to Richard Feynman being a Nobel-prize winning physicist, also found the Feynman-Kac solution to the third-order partial differential solution that Black and Scholes used in their option-pricing formula. So, he's actually about a Nobel-Prize winner and maybe a quarter (once on his own, and once for being useful to B&S.

Finance and Economic Courses on the Web on The Web

Increasingly, people are putting their lectures, teaching material, and (in some cases), entire courses on the web. Here are a few I've recently come across:

A Short Course In Behavioral Economics: Daniel Kahneman (yes, the Nobel Laureate) has recorded and posted videos of a two day conference called "Thinking about Thinking".

Robert Schiller's Spring 2008 Financial Markets Class at Yale: Schiller has done a great deal of work in market efficiency, and also created the Case-Schiller Index of Home Prices.

While surfing through Yale's Open Classes, I also found a class titled Game Theory, by Ben Polak, a widely published economist. He seems to cover all the big topics: Nash (and other) Equilibrium concepts, Adverse Selection, Signalling, and even Evolutionary Game Theory.

If you know of other finance/econ classes on the web, let me know in the comments section and I'll post them here.

A Website On Game Theory

Like most people with graduate level training in economics, I've had a fairly good exposure to game theory. For those who are unfamiliar with the term, game theory analyzes situations where an individual's actions affect not only their own welfare (i.e. their "payoffs"), but also the payoffs to others with whom they are interacting. The graph above illustrates probably the most well know game-theoretic scenario, known as the Prisoner's Dilemma.

The picture comes from Robert Schenk's site, CyberEconomics. He has a nice section on game theory that's both factually correct and easily understandable here.

Enjoy.

Two Nobel Winners For The Price of One

Today's Wall Street Journal has an interview of Nobel Prize Winner Thomas Schelling by his student Michale Spence (another Nobel winner). It's a must read - Schelling and Spence discuss nuclear deterrence and other weighty topics.