- Person
- Robert Aumann
- Lived
- b. 1930
- Field
- Game theory
- From
- Israeli-American
The story
In the mid-1960s the United States was negotiating with the Soviet Union over arms control and disarmament. To help shape American policy, the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency began a research project that brought together some of the most brilliant game theorists of the era. Among them were John Harsanyi, Reinhard Selten and Gerard Debreu, all three later Nobel laureates, as well as Richard Stearns, a future winner of the Turing Award, and Harold Kuhn and Herbert Scarf.
Robert Aumann, then a mathematician at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, joined the project with his longtime collaborator Michael Maschler. Several times a year the group met in Washington to discuss arms control with one another and with the agency's staff, and between meetings they worked alone or in small groups at home.
Aumann and Maschler took on a problem at the heart of such negotiations: what happens when the same parties deal with each other again and again, but one side knows things the other does not. Their theory of repeated games with incomplete information analysed how much a better-informed side should reveal through its actions, knowing that each move can be read by the other side, and how the less-informed side can learn over time. Stearns also played an important part. In 1966 Aumann and Maschler published a related paper on the game-theoretic aspects of gradual disarmament.
Aumann later doubted that the project had much direct influence on policy, while noting that a conversation over lunch with an agency official can sometimes shape thinking in ways no one can trace. Its scientific influence, however, was large. For years the original reports circulated only as hard-to-find agency documents. In 1995 MIT Press published them as the book Repeated Games with Incomplete Information, with extensive notes on later work, and it won the Lanchester Prize of the Operations Research Society of America as the best book of the year in its field.
The work spawned a large scientific literature and became a foundation of the modern theory of repeated games, part of the body of research for which Aumann shared the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Why it matters
Aumann's work brought rigorous mathematics to the question of how adversaries can negotiate safely when one side knows more than the other, a concern at the centre of nuclear diplomacy and many later negotiations.
About Robert Aumann
German-born Orthodox Jewish mathematician in Jerusalem whose theory of repeated games showed how cooperation can last between rivals; Nobel Prize in Economics 2005.
More about Robert Aumann
- Robert Aumann co-founded Jerusalem's Center for RationalityAround 1990–91 Robert Aumann helped found the Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a game theory centre drawing members from more than a dozen departments.
- Robert Aumann proved rational people can't agree to disagreeIn his 1976 paper Agreeing to Disagree, Robert Aumann gave the first formal definition of common knowledge and proved that rational people sharing the same starting beliefs cannot agree to disagree.
- Robert Aumann invented correlated equilibriumRobert Aumann was the first to define correlated equilibrium, a broader idea than the Nash equilibrium that shows how a shared signal or mediator can help rivals coordinate.
- A nuclear defence puzzle drew Robert Aumann to game theoryRobert Aumann, trained in pure mathematics, turned to game theory in the 1950s to solve a practical problem: how to defend a city against bombers when most of them are decoys.
- Robert Aumann showed mathematically why cooperation lastsRobert Aumann proved that repeated encounters can make cooperation between rivals rational, work on conflict and cooperation that earned him the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.
- Robert Aumann and Lloyd Shapley analysed games of the manyWith Lloyd Shapley, Robert Aumann wrote Values of Non-Atomic Games in 1974, extending game theory to markets and elections with huge numbers of players and giving rise to the Aumann–Shapley value.
- Robert Aumann trained a generation of game theoristsRobert Aumann's doctoral students at the Hebrew University include Sergiu Hart, Abraham Neyman, David Schmeidler and Yair Tauman, each a leading figure in game theory.
Sources
- Robert J. Aumann, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Robert Aumann Wikipedia
- Michael Maschler Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.