He will also be conducting laboratory experiments on these games. Michael Herron, Stanford Michael is using a genetic algorithm to find useful predictive patterns within voting data. Such nonlinear techniques may serve as a superior alternative to many existing statistical techniques. Robert Hoffman , University of East Anglia, England Robert is exploring the dynamics of locally-connected agents playing the repeated Prisoner's dilemma. By adjusting both neighborhood size of interactions and adaptation, he is finding a variety of interesting results concerning the strategic dynamics of the system.
Profit maximization is difficult.
Sophisticated and experienced managers often disagree about which action is most likely to maximize profits for a given firm. Well-trained economists can readily discern the action which maximizes the firm's objective function. The global maximum is unique and achievable because the objective function is designed to have this property. This paper weakens the assumption of analytically tractable objective functions. I propose a model of profit maximization in which it is, essentially, impossible for the firm to discover the global maximum.