Focal Points (Schelling’s Points)

Thomas C. Schelling Born in 1921 Ph.D. in Economics, Harvard University Currently – University of Maryland school of public affairs. Worked in Economics / political sciences. 8 books more then 140 papers: 1. The Strategy of Conflict, Arms and Influence, Bargaining, Communication and Limited War, 1993

“ The Strategy of Conflict ” Deals with Theory of Bargaining/conflict/strategy. 1. Elements of A Theory of Strategy. 2. A Reorientation of Game Theory, 3. Strategy with a Random Ingredient. 4. Surprise Attack: A Study of Mutual Distrust. We are talking about a very interesting concept that resides inside 15 pages from the first chapter of the book.

להוציא עפרונות

Solutions Question 1: 36/42 wrote HEADS, 6/42 wrote TAILS. Question 2: 37/41 picked one of the FIRST THREE NUMBERS (7, 100, 13) with 7 leading on a slight margin, 100 second place and 13 third place.

Solutions Question 3: 24/41picked upper left corner. 38/31 were on that same diagonal. Question 4: Absolute majority picked “Grand Central Station” (information booth).

Solutions Question 5: All of them picked 12:00 noon. Question 6 : Variety of answer, but 2/5 picked 1.

Solutions Question 7: 12/41 picked 1,000,000$. 38/41 picked power of 10 number (the three others were 2 * 64$ and 1 * 64,000$). Question 8: 36/41 split it fifty-fifty.

Focal Point “People can often coordinate their intentions with others if each knows that the other is trying to do the same.” “A Prime characteristic of most of these ‘solutions’ …., is some kind of prominence…” This prominence depends on time and place and who the people are.

What has been done Theoretical Work: Gauthier (1975) “coordination”. Bacharach (1993) “Variable Universe Games” Janssen (1995) “Rationalizing Focal Points” Sugden (1995) “Toward a Theory of Focal Points”

What has been done Experimental Work: Van Huyck (1990) “Tactic Coordination Games”. Mehta, Starmer, Sugden: (1992) “an experimental investigation of focal points in coordination and bargaining”. (1994) “the nature of salience, empirical investigation of pure coordination games” (1994) “focal points in pure coordination games, an experimental investigation”

What has been done Overview Papers: Janssen (1998) “Focal Points”. Computer Science Papers: Sarit Kraus, Jeff Rosenschein, Maier Fenster (2000) “Exploiting Focal Points Among Alternative Solutions: Two Approaches” Conference: Focal Points – coordination, complexity and communication in strategic contexts (Lund University, august 1997).

Our Path Goal: Using Focal Points insights in the problem of selection between multiple equilibriums with same utility. Example: 1)Robot finding a key. 2)Travel-Agent agent. Any application that a computer agent needs to select between options for a human agent.

The 1 st Sub Goal: Improving Machine Learning classifiers using Focal Points. The Domain: A game were the user has to choose a goal between few goals with the same payoff.

Using the following FP properties: 1. Uniqueness 2. Centrality 3. Firstness

The Method: 1. Data Gathering 2. Building ANN/ID3 tree classifiers (given a game instance will classify which goal the user will choose). 3. Incorporate Focal Point properties into the data and hope for better classification with shorter learning time.

Discussion