Parents, here’s how game theory can help you survive candy sharing on Halloween

The costumes looked great. The bags are stuffed with goodies. But the scariest part of Halloween is just getting started: dividing the spoils of trick-or-treating.

The costumes looked great. The bags are stuffed with goodies. But the scariest part of Halloween is just getting started: dividing the spoils of trick-or-treating.
If you haven’t yet watched Love Island, a British reality TV show, you haven’t missed out. Its premise is simple: a few dozen very attractive, heterosexual twenty-somethings spend seven weeks in a villa in Mallorca without much more than a bathing suit and a raging libido. Once a week they get to decide whom they want...
A couple of days before Christmas, the CEO of our company sent an email to all the staff asking for someone to research a certain topic. I was immediately reminded of an academic paper I wrote a while back that covered the volunteer’s dilemma (VD). Our CEO’s request provided an excellent opportunity to study the VD in...
In the race to have an advantage in customer retention, most airline companies rely on a cumulative points system to unlock status and purchasing power on duty free items. Behavioural science, the study of human irrationality, can often introduce improvements to traditional solutions:
The study of matching markets has a long tradition in economics and is a major focus in the field of market design. Examples of matching markets are manifold, ranging from kidney exchange through to school selection and online dating. One common feature across most of these markets is that monetary payment is limited...