Corporate & Securities Law

Armen Alchian Plays Prisoners’ Dilemma

Many economists know of the famous repeated prisoners’ dilemma experiments played by famous economists.  I recently came across this old post from Brad Delong with an excerpt from Poundstone (1992) which recounts a game between Armen Alchian (who should win the Nobel Prize this year) and Rand economist John Williams.  It includes comments in the margins from the players between rounds, and is therefore, well worth hitting on the link.  Here are more links to Armen and his work:

• A Biography  and another profile hosted at David Levine?s website
• Uncertainty and Economic Evolution: Essays in Honor of Armen A. Alchian (edited by John R. Lott, Jr.)
• A 2000 Liberty Fund interview by Daniel K. Benjamin in the Intellectual Portrait series
• Alchian?s collected works in two volumes
• Alchian?s ?Property Rights? entry to the Concise Enyclopedia of Economics
• A profile of Alchian in the UCLA Daily Bruin in 2006
• My blog post making the case for a ?UCLA School? Nobel Prize in honor of the contributions of Alchian, Demsetz & Klein

Full post as published by Truth on the Market on October 05, 2008 (boomark / email).