The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Ole Miss Debate
John McCain will attend the debate at Ole Miss tonight.
No, he hasn’t made an announcement. But I’m fairly confident he will, and I have been since yesterday morning. How am I so confident? Game theory. Now, game theory doesn’t give you answers. But it does help you discipline your intuition, requiring you to first be explicit about your assumptions and then helping you see their interaction without allowing extraneous considerations to cloud the picture. So think of game theory (or any formal modeling) as Photoshop: it can remove the red-eye and clear up the resolution, but you still take the picture.
So let’s look at McCain’s situation. There are two players, McCain and Obama. They have two choices: attend the Mississippi debate or not. So there are four potential outcomes:
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