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2. Kenneth G. Binmore
- University of Michigan Press
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chapter 2 Kenneth G. Binmore Professor of Economics, University College, London This interview took place on November 30, 2001, in Princeton, New Jersey, at the residence of David Colander. How did you get into economics? I didn’t intend to be an economist when I set out. I began by studying chemical engineering at the University of London, but my adviser assured me it would only get duller and duller, and so I switched to mathematics, which was good for me. We were mostly taught applied mathematics, which proved useful in a bread-andbutter kind of way when I eventually became an economist, but what I wanted to be at the end of my undergraduate career was a pure mathematician. The big guns at my college were into classical analysis, and so this is the kind of stuff my early papers are about. In the paper I am still proudest of, I solved one of the lesser problems left over by the great mathematicians Hardy and Littlewood. It was from Littlewood that I ‹rst learned about common knowledge. His Mathematician’s Miscellany of 1937 already has the story of the three ladies with dirty faces that people keep reinventing all the time (Littlewood 1986). I was never very good at plowing a single furrow, and I switched 49 ‹elds several times, working on both real and complex analysis, approximation theory and functional analysis. But the big jump came when an unpleasant new chairman persuaded those of us active in research to look for jobs elsewhere. I ended up at the London School of Economics, which was then in the thick of the big Vietnam demonstrations of the ’60s. But I still had no intention of becoming an economist. I was hired to be part of a new mathematics group in a large department of statistics and computing because I had written some papers on probability theory. I continued working in pure mathematics for ten years or so after the move, eventually becoming chairman of the department. I still get royalty checks from some of the mathematical textbooks I wrote during this period. I used to attend the LSE mathematical economics seminar to see what mathematics I should be teaching. At ‹rst I didn’t understand very much, but one day, I found myself thinking that I could do better than yesterday’s speaker on the subject of Arrow’s impossibility theorem, and that was the start of the slippery slope (Binmore 1975). How did you get into game theory and bargaining? I was always interested in games. I loved to play and invent board games as a kid. When I was a student, I foolishly used to play poker for immensely more than I could afford to lose. One of my duties at LSE was to organize the teaching of mathematics to social scientists, including economists. So I got one of the mathematicians who knew something about it to put on a game theory course. When he left suddenly, my colleagues said that I had to teach the course because it was my idea in the ‹rst place. So I took von Neumann and Morgenstern’s book (1944) with me on a sailing trip during which we were trapped in Cherbourg harbor for a week by gales. Having very little money to get out and around with, there wasn’t much for me to do but read the book. I suspect I am the only person who has ever read the whole book from cover to cover. When I got to the poker models, I just couldn’t believe that so much bluf‹ng could be optimal. Nor could I understand von Neumann’s mathematics. So I worked it out for myself. And he was right! How could von Neumann be wrong? This hooked me on the subject, and I went back to teach the game theory course feeling enthusiastic about it. Because I was completely new to the subject, I didn’t know where the changing face of economics 50 [44.202.128.177] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:23 GMT) game theory had gone astray. So, instead of writing more and more axioms for cooperative solutions as people were doing in the ’60s, I went off in another direction. I returned to Nash’s papers of the early ’50s. His bargaining papers were particularly fascinating. So I started working on bargaining, and that’s when I was ‹nally captured by economics. But nobody was interested in bargaining...