Seriously?

Yesterday was a bit annoying.

In the morning, I taught my class. The topic was "Do institutions matter for economic growth?" Included in this topic was a discussion of how coordination or cooperation is a conundrum for rational choice theory. When you assume people are rationally self interested and always pursue their self interest, it becomes very hard to explain most forms of cooperation. In order to illustrate this, I introduced my students to the most common game in Game Theory - the prisoners dilemma. Its not very difficult and really gets the basic ideas of game theory and of coordination problems across in a efficient manner.

Three hours later, I was sitting in my own economics class. ECON 805 is the second quarter of the economic graduate microeconomics sequence. These are people who mostly have undergraduate degrees in economics. We "started" game theory. Guess what he "introduced" us to? The prisoners dilemma. That is right. I both taught and was taught the same model in the same day.

It is absolutely ridiculous. Someone who has never been introduced to the prisoners dilemma has no business being in a graduate level economics course for Economic PhD Candidates. This microeconomics sequence is turning out to be quite useless - a lot of work for not much return in terms of what I WANT to be learning. I expected to be learning advanced game theory and formalization, not the prisoners dilemma.