Three Approaches to Modeling Corporate Games: Some Observations

Abstract

It is a special honor to be able to comment on the excellent papers of Professors Gordon, Leebron and Shubik because these authors have each previously taught me important things about game theory and/or corporations. Like legions of other Yale students; I audited part of Professor Shubik's game theory course in order to learn from one of the modem masters of the field. And Professors Gordon and Leebron are two of the reasons that Columbia Law School has the strongest corporate group in the country. Professor Gordon in particular has taught me much of what I know about stock market efficiency. Professor Shubik, in his contribution to this symposium, divides game-theoretic scholarship into three levels of mathematical sophistication: high church, low church, and conversational. His tripartite distinction is an especially useful place to begin analyzing the papers of Shubik, Leebron and Gordon, because they are fine examples of each branch of the literature. Professor Shubik himself discovered many of the techniques that dominate the high church literature. His article introduces some of the more fundamental but initially inaccessible results of explicit high church (or some economists alternatively use the jargon "high-brow") modeling.