By John Considine
While sport provides experimental settings for economists to test their theories, it can be difficult to separate the physical and the mental elements. As a result, some sport settings are better than others. Chess is better than most. It has a long (and checkered!) history of use by economists. Here are some examples.
A September 2023 paper in Management Science examines the relationship between the quality of chess moves and the quality of the air that the participants were inhaling. I found the use of chess and the methods more interesting that the results. The paper uses over 30,000 moves, made by 121 players, in 609 games in official tournaments held in Germany between 2017 and 2019. Twenty-first century journal editors and academic referees like large datasets. The quality of these 30,000 moves were evaluated using a chess algorithm. Each move could be measured by the change in probability of winning. (Not surprisingly, the authors found that the quality of moves deteriorated as the quality of the air deteriorated.)
The Management Science paper uses the actions of chess players as data from a "field" experiment. It is interesting to see human action being evaluated by an algorithm (that is based on previous moves by chess players). Previously, economists like Steven Levitt and Ignacio Palacios-Huerta have also used chess as a source of data. In their cases, chess players behaviour is used to examine the capacity of humans to undertake backward induction using other games, e.g centipede. Research has used the ranking of chess players to test for differences in the capacity to use backward induction.
Rather than collecting data from chess games, Thomas Schelling famously experimented using a 16x16 chess/checkers board to test his dynamic models of segregation. Schelling’s results were sensitive to the assigned motivation of the zinc and copper coins used to populate the board. Schelling’s experiments were more of the trial & error type. Schelling effectively used the board to experiment with his ideas.
Adam Smith used chess to illustrate, rather than test, his ideas. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Smith criticized those who believe that they “can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board” because “each single piece has a principle of motion of its own”.
Chess is a useful sport (game) for economists.
A September 2023 paper in Management Science examines the relationship between the quality of chess moves and the quality of the air that the participants were inhaling. I found the use of chess and the methods more interesting that the results. The paper uses over 30,000 moves, made by 121 players, in 609 games in official tournaments held in Germany between 2017 and 2019. Twenty-first century journal editors and academic referees like large datasets. The quality of these 30,000 moves were evaluated using a chess algorithm. Each move could be measured by the change in probability of winning. (Not surprisingly, the authors found that the quality of moves deteriorated as the quality of the air deteriorated.)
The Management Science paper uses the actions of chess players as data from a "field" experiment. It is interesting to see human action being evaluated by an algorithm (that is based on previous moves by chess players). Previously, economists like Steven Levitt and Ignacio Palacios-Huerta have also used chess as a source of data. In their cases, chess players behaviour is used to examine the capacity of humans to undertake backward induction using other games, e.g centipede. Research has used the ranking of chess players to test for differences in the capacity to use backward induction.
Rather than collecting data from chess games, Thomas Schelling famously experimented using a 16x16 chess/checkers board to test his dynamic models of segregation. Schelling’s results were sensitive to the assigned motivation of the zinc and copper coins used to populate the board. Schelling’s experiments were more of the trial & error type. Schelling effectively used the board to experiment with his ideas.
Adam Smith used chess to illustrate, rather than test, his ideas. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Smith criticized those who believe that they “can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board” because “each single piece has a principle of motion of its own”.
Chess is a useful sport (game) for economists.
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