VINCENT P. CRAWFORD
Department of Economics
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA  92093-0508

(858) 534-3452
(858) 534-3383 messages
(858) 534-7040 fax

e-mail: vcrawfor "at" dss.ucsd.edu

 

 

On 1 January 2010 I begin appointments as Professorial Fellow of All Souls College and Drummond Professor of Political Economy, Department of Economics, University of Oxford. New contacts will be posted before the move; please continue to use the above contacts until then. At that time I will transfer to emeritus status at UCSD, where I will still be in residence periodically for part of each year, with dates to be posted here.


2003 Photo by Zoe Crawford at right (click to enlarge)

1999 Photos by Dorothy Hahn

 

2009 students on the job market: Ben Gillen, Jaimie Lien, Juanjuan Meng, Bryan Tomlin

Please scroll down for curriculum vitae, older downloadable papers, recent papers and presentations on behavioral labor economics and behavioral and experimental game theory, press, links, and photos

Courses in 2009 – 2010

  • My teaching at Oxford from Hilary Term 2010 on will be covered by websites linked to a home page to be posted at http://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/, but these sites may be closed to people outside the Oxford domain

 

 

 

 

Past Courses


 

 

 

 






 



Curriculum Vitae

(includes "A Game of Fair Division," Review of Economic Studies 44 (June 1977), now a major motion picture!)
 

 

 

 

 

 

Older downloadable papers

 


Recent Papers and Presentations (download free Foxit Reader for pdf files; read Preston McAfee on why it's better (it is: a lot) and on the also-free PDF Forge Creator to make your own pdf files) 



Behavioral labor economics

 


















Behavioral and experimental game theory

 

 

 

Miguel A. Costa-Gomes, Vincent P. Crawford, and Nagore Iriberri, "Comparing Models of Strategic Thinking in Van Huyck, Battalio, and Beil’s Coordination Games," Journal of the European Economic Association 7 (2009), 365-376; presented in the session, "Limited Cognition, Strategic Thinking, and Learning", Milan EEA-ESEM Meetings, 27 - 31 August 2008; previous version

Web appendix: "Limiting LQRE as a Model of Limiting Outcomes in Van Huyck, Battalio, and Beil’s Coordination Games"

 

 

Vincent P. Crawford, Tamar Kugler, Zvika Neeman, and Ady Pauzner, "Behaviorally Optimal Auction Design: An Example and Some Observations," Journal of the European Economic Association 7 (2009), 377=387; presented in the session, "Limited Cognition, Strategic Thinking, and Learning", Milan EEA-ESEM Meetings, 27-31 August 2008; previous version

 

 

Vincent Crawford, "Modeling Behavior in Novel Strategic Situations via Level-k Thinking" Lecture slides (there is no paper yet), presented in the Marketing Seminar, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, 3 April 2008; the Applied Micro Theory Workshop, University of Pennsylvania, 28 April 2008; and at GAMES 2008, Third World Congress of the Game Theory Society, 14 July 2008 

 

(This paper is an extensive revision of Gneezy and Rottenstreich,  “The Power of Focal Points is Limited: Even Minute Payoff Asymmetry yields Massive Coordination Failures,” 2005.)


 

 

 







 

 

Framing the game in our "Chicago Skyscrapers" treatment: the (formerly, now “Willis”!) Sears Tower,

with the AT&T Building in the background on its left

 

 

Vincent P. Crawford, "Level-k Thinking" Lecture slides (there is no paper yet), presented at the 2007 North American Meeting of the Economic Science Association, Tucson, October 18-21

 


 






   










      

 

Vincent P. Crawford and Nagore Iriberri, "Level-k Auctions: Can a Non-Equilibrium Model of Strategic Thinking Explain the Winner's Curse and Overbidding in Private-Value Auctions?," Econometrica 75 (November 2007), 1721–1770; Final version of Web Appendix with detailed calculations and other supporting materials; Lecture slides (ppt)

Previous version, July 2006; Previous version, November 2005 (this version extends our October 2005 specification of truthful level-k types to allow L0 to condition on its own information in a more sensible way, which changes the model's predictions for Avery and Kagel's (1997) design; and corrects an error in our derivation of the implications of random level-k types in Goeree, Holt, and Palfrey's (2002) design); First version, October 2005

 

 

Presented as SESS Student Lecture, Singapore Management University, November 2004


Previous version, February 2006; Previous version, January 2005; Previous version, September 2004; Preliminary version, June 2004

 

Reference (without screen credit, and with no real appreciation of the importance of level-k thinking...) on 2005 episode of the CBS series Numb3rs, "Assassin," first aired 10/21/2005 (courtesy of William Nguyen Phan; YouTube Clip; Text; Moriarti Comment)  

Charlie: Hide and seek.
Don: What are you talking about, like the kids’ version?
Charlie: A mathematical approach to it, yes. See, the assassin must hide in order to accomplish his goal, we must seek and find the assassin before he achieves that goal.
Megan: Ah, behavioral game theory, yeah, we studied this at Quantico.
Charlie: I doubt you studied it the way that Rubinstein, Tversky and Heller studied two person constant sum hide and seek with unique mixed strategy equilibria.
Megan: No, not quite that way.
Don: Just bear with him.


Thoughts on Hide and Seek games played on naturally occuring "landscapes" from Edgar Allan Poe's The Purloined Letter (complete story)

General principles:

"…But he perpetually errs by being too deep or too shallow, for the matter in hand; and many a schoolboy is a better reasoner than he. I knew one about eight years of age, whose success at guessing in the game of 'even and odd' attracted universal admiration. This game is simple, and is played with marbles. One player holds in his hand a number of these toys, and demands of another whether that number is even or odd. If the guess is right, the guesser wins one; if wrong, he loses one. The boy to whom I allude won all the marbles of the school. Of course he had some principle of guessing; and this lay in mere observation and admeasurement of the astuteness of his opponents. For example, an arrant simpleton is his opponent, and, holding up his closed hand, asks, 'are they even or odd?' Our schoolboy replies, 'odd,' and loses; but upon the second trial he wins, for he then says to himself, the simpleton had them even upon the first trial, and his amount of cunning is just sufficient to make him have them odd upon the second; I will therefore guess odd'; --he guesses odd, and wins. Now, with a simpleton a degree above the first, he would have reasoned thus: 'This fellow finds that in the first instance I guessed odd, and, in the second, he will propose to himself upon the first impulse, a simple variation from even to odd, as did the first simpleton; but then a second thought will suggest that this is too simple a variation, and finally he will decide upon putting it even as before. I will therefore guess even' guesses even, and wins. Now this mode of reasoning in the schoolboy, whom his fellows termed 'lucky,' --what, in its last analysis, is it?"


"It is merely," I said, "an identification of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent."

 

(glossary: "arrant simpleton" = L1 (conditional on shared history, which makes one choice focal in a way that would attract L0); "simpleton a degree above the first" = L2; boy with all the marbles = L2 or L3, depending on his assessment of how simple his opponent is)

Specific application:

"At length my eyes, in going the circuit of the room, fell upon a trumpery filigree card-rack of pasteboard, that hung dangling by a dirty blue ribbon, from a little brass knob just beneath the middle of the mantelpiece. In this rack, which had three or four compartments, were five or six visiting cards and a solitary letter. This last was much soiled and crumpled. It was torn nearly in two, across the middle --as if a design, in the first instance, to tear it entirely up as worthless, had been altered, or stayed, in the second. It had a large black seal, bearing the D-- cipher very conspicuously, and was addressed, in a diminutive female hand, to D--, the minister, himself. It was thrust carelessly, and even, as it seemed, contemptuously, into one of the upper divisions of the rack.

 

"No sooner had I glanced at this letter, than I concluded it to be that of which I was in search. To be sure, it was, to all appearance, radically different from the one of which the Prefect had read us so minute a description. Here the seal was large and black, with the D-- cipher; there it was small and red, with the ducal arms of the S-- family. Here, the address, to the Minister, was diminutive and feminine; there the superscription, to a certain royal personage, was markedly bold and decided; the size alone formed a point of correspondence. But, then, the radicalness of these differences, which was excessive; the dirt; the soiled and torn condition of the paper, so inconsistent with the true methodical habits of D--, and so suggestive of a design to delude the beholder into an idea of the worthlessness of the document; these things, together with the hyperobtrusive situation of this document, full in the view of every visitor, and thus exactly in accordance with the conclusions to which I had previously arrived; these things, I say, were strongly corroborative of suspicion, in one who came with the intention to suspect."

 

 

 

Vincent P. Crawford, "Look-ups as the Windows of the Strategic Soul: Studying Cognition via Information Search in Game Experiments" (based on joint work with Miguel A. Costa-Gomes and Bruno Broseta), in Andrew Caplin and Andrew Schotter, editors, Perspectives on the Future of Economics: Positive and Normative Foundations, Volume 1 in the series Handbooks of Economic Methodologies, Oxford University Press, 2008; Lecture Slides presented at Methodologies of Modern Economics Conference, Center for Experimental Social Science, New York University, 28-29 July 2006; Lecture Slides to be presented at the Conference on the Foundations of Positive and Normative Economics, New York University, 25-26 April 2008.

Previous version, October 2006

 

 

Miguel A. Costa-Gomes and Vincent P. Crawford, "Studying Cognition via Information Search in Two-Person Guessing Game Experiments," paper still in progress

 

Lecture Slides, Berkeley Psychology and Economics Seminar, 6 March 2007, and the Barcelona JOCS Seminar, 26 March 2007; focusing on cognitive and experimental issues; earlier version of Lecture Slides, Chicago, 2007, AEA Meetings; focusing on cognitive and experimental issues

Lecture Slides, Workshop on Econometrics and Experimental Economics, Northwestern University, 28 April 2006; focusing on econometric issues

Lecture Slides, "Studying Strategic Thinking by Monitoring Search for Hidden Payoff Information and Interpreting the Data in the Light of Algorithms that Link Cognition, Search, and Decisions," NSF Workshop on “Behavior, Computation, and Networks in Human Subject Experimentation,” Del Mar, California, July 31-August 1, 2008

 

Lecture Slides, "Studying Strategic Thinking Experimentally by Monitoring Search for Hidden Payoff Information," Behavioral, Social and Computer Sciences Seminar, Calit2, University of California, San Diego, 10 June 2009


      

 

 

 

Miguel A. Costa-Gomes and Vincent P. Crawford, "Cognition and Behavior in Two-Person Guessing Games: An Experimental Study," American Economic Review 96 (December 2006), 1737-1768; Web Appendix (zip) (A. Instructions for Baseline and Robot/Trained Subjects Treatments; B. Description of Pilots; C. Preliminary Statistical Tests; D. Figures Showing Subjects' Aggregate Guess Distributions, Game by Game; E. Subjects' Guess and Look-up Data; F. Specification Tests and Analysis of Clusters; G. Supplementary Tables; H. Analysis of Search); Data Appendix (zip); Lecture slides; part of Figure 1 from Nagel (1995 AER) referred to in slides

Previous version, August 2006; previous version, December 2005; previous version, October 2004; first version, April 2004


Figures showing aggregate frequency distributions of guesses game by game (with games identified by the codes from Table 2):

Sara Robinson extensively discusses this paper in her article, "How Real People Think in Strategic Games," in the January/Februrary 2004 issue of SIAM News


 

 

Vincent P. Crawford, "Lying for Strategic Advantage: Rational and Boundedly Rational Misrepresentation of
Intentions," American Economic Review 93 (March 2003), 133-149; Lecture slides

Previous version (UCSD Discussion Paper 2001-16)









 


Mike Royko's column

 

 



Quotes:

    • "The truth deserves a bodyguard of lies." -- Winston Churchill, Teheran, 1943
    • "The threat reporting that we received in the Spring and Summer of 2001 was not specific as to time, nor place, nor manner of attack. Almost all of the reports focused on al-Qaida activities outside the United States, especially in the MiddleEast and North Africa. In fact, the information that was specific enough to be actionable referred to terrorist operations overseas. More often, it was frustratingly vague.

Let me read you some of the actual chatter that we picked up that Spring and Summer:

 

· 'Unbelievable news in coming weeks'

· 'Big event ... there will be a very, very, very, very big uproar'

· 'There will be attacks in the near future'

 

Troubling, yes. But they don’t tell us when; they don’t tell us where; they don’t tell us who; and they don’t tell us how." -- Condoleeza Rice, Opening Remarks to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 8 April 2004.

    • Question for Rice, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld:  If Al-Quaeda had sent you a message saying "We're going to hijack airplanes and crash them into the World Trade Center--the one in New York City--on September 11--this September 11", would you have believed them?

 

 

"Συνέντευξη του Διακεκριμένου Καθηγητή του Πανεπιστημίου της Καλιφόρνια, Σαν Ντιέγκο, Professor Vincent P. Crawford: Στο εργαστήριο μαθαίνουμε πώς λαμβάνονται οι αποφάσεις," Εφημερίδα ΤA ΝΕΑ 15/03/2005, ειδικό ένθετο MBA Ανοιχτό: ("Interview of Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Diego, Professor Vincent P. Crawford: In the Laboratory We Learn How Decisions are Made", in the special inset "MBA Open" of the Greek newspaper "The News," 15 March 2005 (interviewed by Constantina Kottaridi))

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vincent P. Crawford, "Introduction to Experimental Game Theory" (Symposium), Journal of Economic Theory 104 (May 2002), 1-15; html






 

Preliminary version (UCSD Discussion Paper 98-22, includes appendices); extensively revised version plus Appendix A (UCSD Discussion Paper 2000-02R), Appendices B, C, D, and E; Lecture slides; MouseLab home page

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vincent P. Crawford, "Learning Dynamics, Lock-in, and Equilibrium Selection in Experimental Coordination Games," in Ugo Pagano and Antonio Nicita, editors, The Evolution of Economic Diversity (papers from Workshop X, International School of Economic Research, University of Siena), London and New York: Routledge, 2001, 133-163; Lecture slides

 

Readers (and potential Routledge authors) should note that Routledge eliminated crucial parts of Figure 6.2(b), making it meaningless. There should be a closed dot at (2,0) and an open dot at (0,0), as in the UCSD Discussion Paper 97-19 version.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vincent P. Crawford and Bruno Broseta, "What Price Coordination? The Efficiency-enhancing Effect of Auctioning the Right to Play," American Economic Review 88 (March 1998), 198-225.

 

 

 

Vincent Crawford, "Theory and Experiment in the Analysis of Strategic Interaction," in David Kreps and Ken Wallis, editors, Advances in Economics and Econometrics: Theory and Applications, Seventh World Congress, Vol. I, Econometric Society Monographs No. 27, Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 206-242; reprinted with minor changes and additions in Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Matthew Rabin, editors, Advances in Behavioral Economics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003, 344-373.

 

 

 

Vincent Crawford, "A Survey of Experiments on Communication via Cheap Talk," Journal of Economic Theory 78 (February 1998), 286-298.



 

Vincent P. Crawford, "Adaptive Dynamics in Coordination Games," Econometrica 63 (January 1995), 103-143

 

 

Vincent P. Crawford, "An 'Evolutionary' Interpretation of Van Huyck, Battalio, and Beil's Experimental Results on Coordination," Games and Economic Behavior 3 (February 1991), 25-59

 

Vincent P. Crawford,  "Explicit Communication and Bargaining Outcomes," American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 80 (May 1990), 213-219

 

 

Vincent P. Crawford, "Equilibrium without Independence," Journal of Economic Theory 50 (February 1990), 127-154

 

 

Vincent P. Crawford, "Learning and Mixed-Strategy Equilibria in Evolutionary Games," Journal of Theoretical Biology 140 (23 October 1989), 537-550


 

 

Matching Markets


Vincent P. Crawford, "The Flexible-Salary Match: A Proposal to Increase the Salary Flexibility of the National Resident Matching Program," Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 66 (2008), 149-160; working paper version.

 

Previous version, February 2005; First version, August 2004

 

Sara Robinson's August 24, 2004 New York Times article about the proposal, "Tweaking the Math to Make Happier Medical Marriages" and the graphic published with the article

 

Patricia Morén's March 29, 2007 Diario Medico (free online registration required) article about the proposal, "La flexibilidad salarial del residente mejora su asignación a distintos centros"

 

Read more about the National Resident Matching Program; about the residents' lawsuit

 

 

Vincent P. Crawford and Elsie Marie Knoer, "Job Matching with Heterogeneous Firms and Workers," Econometrica 49 (March 1981), 437-450

 

 

Alexander S. Kelso, Jr., and Vincent P. Crawford, "Job Matching, Coalition Formation, and Gross Substitutes," Econometrica 50 (November 1982), 1483-1504

 

 

Vincent P. Crawford, "Comparative Statics in Matching Markets," Journal of Economic Theory 54 (August 1991), 389-400

 

 

Miscellany

 

 

Vincent P. Crawford and Ping-Sing Kuo, "A Dual Dutch Auction in Taipei: The Choice of Numeraire and Auction Form in Multi-Object Auctions with Bundling," Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 52 (August 2003), 427-442; final version (UCSD Discussion Paper 2000-10); Lecture slides

 

 

 

 

 

 

"The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Stuffiness" or "Who is Gerard Wanrooy and why did he (and his boss at Elsevier, Joop Dirkmaat), overriding JEBO editor Barkley Rosser's decision, refuse to publish one of these photographs in the article or to post them as accompanying materials linked on JEBO's website; and why did they try even to refuse us the right to publish a link in JEBO to the photographs posted on this website?"

 

 

Informal talk on "Strategies for Getting Papers Published in Journals" (audio only, hard to hear), National Dong Hwa University, Hualien, Taiwan, October 2008









 




 



 

Vincent P. Crawford, "Review of Games of Strategy by Avinash Dixit and Susan Skeath," Journal of Economic Literature 39 (September 2001), 904-905; html


 
 

   
 


    
 
  

 



Vincent Crawford, "John Nash and the Analysis of Strategic Behavior,"  Economics Letters 75 (May 2002), 377-382; UCSD Discussion Paper 2000-03; reprinted in Greek translation, with minor changes, as "O John Nash και η ανάλυση της στρατηγικής συμπεριφοράς," in Θεωρια Παιγνιων: Αφιερωμα στον John Nash (Game Theory: A Festschrift in Honor of John Nash), Constantina Kottaridi and Gregorios Siourounis, editors, Athens: Eurasia Publications, 2002

 

 

 
 

 

 

Vincent P. Crawford, "Review of Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge by Michael Suk-Young Chwe," Journal of Economic Literature 40 (June 2002), 577-578; html


 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 


Past Courses (at UCSD unless otherwise noted; only most recent year is shown for undergraduate courses)

 

  • Mini-Course on "Level-k Thinking", National Taiwan University and Academia Sinica, Taipei, 6-7 October 2008; Lecture Slides

















  • Mini-Course on Strategic Thinking, Thailand Ministry of Finance Executive Program, July 2005 (no online materials)




Press

  • Sara Robinson's August 24, 2004 New York Times article, "Tweaking the Math to Make Happier Medical Marriages" (html) and the graphic published with the article (jpg), discussing:
  • Interview of Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Diego, Professor Vincent P. Crawford: "In the Laboratory We Learn How Decisions are Made,"  in the special inset "MBA Open" of the Greek newspaper "The News," 15 March 2005 by Constantina Kottaridi (Lecturer in Economics, University of Peloponnese) (html in Greek; archive link in Greek; doc in English)
  • Patricia Morén's 29 March 2007 Diario Medico (free online registration required) article about the proposal, "La flexibilidad salarial del residente mejora su asignación a distintos centros" (pdf)

 

 

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Photos from the 2003 Induction Ceremony 

 

 

American Economic Association

 

Econometric Society 

 


Game Theory Society

 






In memory of my father, Bennett Crain, 1930-2006












 


Great-great-great-great-uncle "Bill" (William Harris Crawford, 1772-1834; click to enlarge) 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           


Photos

 
 
 
 

 

 


  

 

Vincent Crawford/ UCSD Department of Economics /last modified 10 November 2009

Copyright © Vincent P. Crawford, 2009. All federal and state copyrights reserved for all original material presented on this site, or in the courses it refers to, through any medium, including lecture or print.