Date:
| Where | Online: https://www.harvard.com/event/virtual_event_moshe_hoffman_and_erez_yoeli/ |
| When | April 8, 2022 @12:00PM |
| Organization/Sponsor | Harvard Division of Science, Harvard Library, and Harvard Book Store |
| Speaker(s) | Erez Yoeli, Moshe Hoffman, and Andrew McAfee |
| Cost | free |
| Contact Info | science_lectures@fas.harvard.edu |
We like to think of ourselves as rational. This idea is the foundation for classical economic analysis of human behavior, including the awesome achievements of game theory. But as behavioral economics shows, most behavior doesn’t seem rational at all—which, unfortunately, to cast doubt on game theory’s real-world credibility.
In Hidden Games, Moshe Hoffman and Erez Yoeli find a surprising middle ground between the hyperrationality of classical economics and the hyper-irrationality of behavioral economics. They call it hidden games. Reviving game theory, Hoffman and Yoeli use it to explain our most puzzling behavior, from the mechanics of Stockholm syndrome and internalized misogyny to why we help strangers and have a sense of fairness.
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Moshe Hoffman is a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, a research fellow at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and a lecturer at Harvard's department of economics. His research focuses on using game theory, models of learning and evolution, and experimental methods to decipher the motives that shape our social behavior, preferences, and ideologies. He lives in Lubeck, Germany.
Erez Yoeli is a research scientist at MIT's Sloan School of Management, the director of MIT’s Applied Cooperation Team (ACT), and a lecturer at Harvard’s department of economics. His research focuses on altruism: understanding how it works and how to promote it. Yoeli collaborates with governments, nonprofits, and companies to apply the lessons of this research towards addressing real-world challenges. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Andrew McAfee is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy and a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is the author of More from Less and the coauthor of The Second Machine Age. His next book The Geek Way will be published by Little, Brown in 2023.
For more information and videos of Harvard Science Book Talks, see https://science.fas.harvard.edu/book-talks.