The game of chess has been around for centuries and still hasn’t lost its touch which is demonstrated by the sheer number of professional and non-professional players and countless pop culture references. In this episode chess grandmaster Daniel King walks us through his very own journey from being a professional chess player to becoming author, live commentator and YouTuber and what it takes to come up with the perfect strategy. We talk about why chess theoretically can be solved but still hasn’t lost its appeal as one of the most popular board games in history and how professional players’ strategies have evolved due to the rise of powerful computers and machine learning.

Daniel King is known for being an English chess grandmaster, a well-known chess live commentator, an award-winning author of several books, a freelance journalist and many more. On top of that he has his own YouTube channel called PowerPlayChess where he shares knowledge and passion for all things chess.

In this episode we talk to Paul Smaldino about identity signaling. He walks us through its definition, the most common examples of identity signaling like language or fashion choices and how game theory can be used to model it. He explains why it is sometimes wise to signal covertly rather than overtly, how this depends on the heterogeneity of groups and what experimental evidence from Twitter has to say about all this.

Paul Smaldino is associate professor of cognitive and information sciences at UC Merced. His research interests include social and cultural evolution, cooperation, communication, and the philosophy of sciences. He studies the feedback between individual behaviors and the sociocultural environments in which they are situated, using both empirical studies and theoretical models (e.g. Game Theory models).

In this episode we talk to Jamey Stegmaier, a board game designer, taking a step away from pure game theory to talk about designing board games. He explains where he gets his initial ideas for new games and what makes a great board game from his perspective. Relating to mechanism design we discuss which mechanisms generate a good interactive game. Jamey also shares his experiences of publishing games through crowdfunding which he went through very successfully in the past.

Jamey Stegmaier is a board game designer and manages the publisher Stonemaier Games. He has designed numerous games, including Viticulture, Scythe, and Tapestry.

In this episode we talk to Cailin O’Connor about inequity in society and how it can be modeled using evolutionary game theory. She explains that few conditions like the division of groups into social categories such as gender or race suffice to lead to stable inequitable patterns which persist over time. We discuss implications when it comes to gender and the division of labour or bargaining situations and why it is so difficult to break inequitable patterns.

Cailin O’Connor is professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at UC Irvine. In her research she focusses on philosophy of biology and science, and evolutionary game theory. She is author of several books, such as “Games in the Philosophy of Biology”, “The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread” and “The Origins of Unfairness: Social Categories and Cultural Evolution”.

In this episode we discuss with Lionel Page, professor of Economics at UTS, his recent research on starting offers in bargaining. We start with talking about the classical ultimatum game and how studies generated a seemingly contradiction to classical game theory. Lionel then explains how he extended the ultimatum game to understand how the value of the initial offer in a bargaining situation affects the outcome of the negotiation.

Lionel Page is professor of Economics at University of Technology Sydney. In his research he focuses on Econometrics, Decision Theory, Sociology and Behavioral Economics. He studies the application to practical problems from areas of financial and prediction markets, education and inequality.

In this episode we chat with Nobel Prize laureate Eric Maskin about why mechanism design calls for an engineering approach and which tools are needed to design economic mechanisms. We discuss what separates a bad from a good mechanism and how this knowledge can help market designers, whether the goal is to reduce carbon emissions or sell spectrum rights.

Eric Maskin is professor of Economics and Mathematics at Harvard University. He has made countless contributions in the fields of Game Theory and Contract Theory, among others, and received the highest recognition when he won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2007 together with his fellow researchers Leonid Hurwicz and Roger Myerson for laying the foundation for the theory of Mechanism Design.