It is a special honor to be able to comment on the excellent papers of Professors
Gordon,
Leebron and Shubik because these authors have each previously taught me important
things about
game theory and/or corporations.
Like legions of other Yale students, I audited part of Professor Shubik's game theory
course
in order to learn from one of the modern masters of the field. And Professors Gordon and
Leebron
are two of the reasons that Columbia Law School has the strongest corporate group in
the country.
Professor Gordon in particular has taught me much of what I know about stock market
efficiency.
Professor Shubik, in his contribution to this symposium, divides game-theoretic
scholarship
into three levels of mathematical sophistication: high church, low church, and
conversational. His
tripartite distinction is an especially useful place to begin analyzing the papers of
Shubik, Leebron
and Gordon, because they are fine examples of each branch of the literature.
Professor Shubik himself discovered many of the techniques that dominate the high
church
literature. His article introduces some of the more fundamental but initially inaccessible
results of
explicit high church (or some economists alternatively use the jargon "high-brow")
modeling.
Professor Leebron's paper is an excellent low church application of several of these
insights
to a specific legal context. Leebron's use of matrix and extensive form representations
of what
Shubik calls the "information sausage" allows readers new to the field to see these
game theoretic
techniques in action. And finally, Jeff Gordon's analysis of the absolute delegation rule
shows how a more conversational approach to game theory can still reveal strategic
interaction that
may strongly affect optimal public policy.
Gordon is able to tell plausible narratives without the heavy artillery of matrices and
game
trees in part because he can refer to what, by now, have become the well-accepted high
and low
church models of the past. For example, Professor Gordon's discussion of cycling is
animated by the
extensive literature that has grown up around the well documented phenomenon.
Gordon's
paper shows that one of the great contributions of conversational approaches is to
identify
similarities between a new context and a well analyzed game. Once the scholar
discovers that a legal
problem is analogous to the prisoners' dilemma or the battle of the sexes, then the
resulting
equilibrium can often be discussed without formally writing down and solving an explicit
model.
In the following paragraphs, I will provide brief and desultory observations about
each of
these works. These comments are made in the same order that the papers were
presented at the
symposium.