Edge Cases

About

This is a personal notebook. The material here is informal — short essays, problem-set worked examples, and reading notes on books I'm working through. The focus drifts between three loosely connected topics:

• classical game theory (zero-sum games, Nash equilibrium, repeated games)
• mechanism and auction design (Vickrey, VCG, matching markets)
• behavioral economics — limited to results that have meaningfully replicated

Nothing here is original research. Everything is either a re-derivation of textbook material, a paraphrase of an academic paper for my own understanding, or a numerical illustration.

Recent notes

• 2026-04 The folk theorem and why repeated cooperation is harder than it looks — minmax payoffs, individually rational outcomes, and the gap between theory and lab experiments.
• 2026-03 VCG mechanism — a worked example with three bidders — showing dominant-strategy truthfulness, the externality interpretation, and why the social planner usually loses money.
• 2026-02 Replication notes — what's left of "ego depletion" after 2016 — a brief survey of meta-analyses, the registered-replication results, and where the original Baumeister model goes wrong.
• 2026-01 Stable matching and the Gale–Shapley algorithm — proof of stability, strategy-proofness for the proposing side, and why hospital-resident markets sometimes need extensions.
• 2025-12 Bayesian persuasion — Kamenica & Gentzkow in 2000 words — reading notes on the 2011 paper and a small numerical example with binary states.
• 2025-11 Prospect theory — the cumulative variant and why it matters — distinguishing the original 1979 formulation from the 1992 cumulative version and what changes.

Reading list

Currently working through Microeconomic Theory by Mas-Colell/Whinston/Green (the chapters on game theory and information economics) alongside Tadelis's Game Theory: An Introduction for less hostile prose. On the behavioral side, Stanovich's The Bias That Divides Us is the current side-read.

Contact

Corrections and pointers welcome at edge at fundamentalchaos.xyz. I read mail irregularly but I do reply eventually.