Pats-Colts - Going For it on 4th Down

Last Sunday night in the NFL game between the New England Patriots and Indianapolis Colts, the Patriots coach Bill Belichek made a decision to go for it on 4th and 2 deep in his own territory near the end of the game. The Patriots held a six point lead at the time. They did not make it, and the Colts ended up scoring and winning by one point. He was roundly criticized all week for the decision.

I generally think that coaches should go for it on 4th down more often than "conventional wisdom" says - so I decided to construct a game tree to analyze Bill Belichek's decision (using what I thought to be conservative estimates for my chance percentages.


The EMV analysis shows that it was indeed the right decision to go for it (again, using my percentages).

As it turns out, since the decision was so controversial, several articles have surfaced this week that have analyzed this subject. The last one is interesting b/c it actually mentions Bill Belichek as having read an article by a game theorist which influenced his decision making on 4th down.

The Count: Misconceptions About That Fourth-Down Call

Belichick 4th Down Follow-Up

Go for It on Fourth Down, Coach? Maybe You Should Ask an Egghead.

Moving Terrorist Trials to NY

I read this op-ed piece in the WSJ today and thought it to be an interesting (game-theorist approved ) theory on why the Obama administration and Eric Holder would try the 9/11 terrorists in NY.

In a nutshell, the administration would have forseen the move of the defendants in the case - who would have asked for reams of evidence about interrogations and surveillance to be brought out into the open. Assuming that the perpetrators would still be brought to justice - moving the trial would allow an adminstration who has been critical of past policy on these matters to have them viewed in the public light without being blamed for open criticism of our national security policy or being "soft on terrorists".

Politics aside - if true then I think it's a cunning move on their part.

Threat of Cold Calling - A Strategic Move?

Recently, I was thinking back to our first class session, when Prof. Noonan was going over the syllabus and specifically the part about class participation and how he intends to use cold calling to make sure we each had a turn giving our own insights into the readings or analysis we had to prepare for each week.

As we are now done with 80% of the class - I have noticed that while cold calling has occurred from time to time, it has not been like I had imagined. The fear of getting cold called, however, was definitely an incentive to finish my readings when motivation waned on the weekends.

So now that I have had a game theory class, I have noticed I try to frame many of my own personal observations using concepts we have covered in class (incidentally, this seems to have happened unintentionally on my part - interesting and slightly annoying at the same time). With respect to this situation, I started to think "hey, I wonder if the cold calling threat was a strategic move." The threat would need to be made credible - so some cold calling was done early on, and I believe at some point a "class enrollment" sheet was produced, with names listed in some random order, with Prof. Noonan casually remarking , "Hmmm, I wonder what I could use this for…" - again adding credibility of the threat (the production of the such as sheet could be seen as a "commitment" as well!)

Who knows if my conspiracy theory is true (it could be that with all the material we've covered there just hasn't been enough class time to terrorize every one of us with cold calling), but if so it's an interesting way to experience an aspect of game theory while actually enrolled in a game theory class.

Apple and DRM

Digital Rights Management or DRM is technology that allows a digital media provider or platform to "lock-down" it's products so that only the purchaser of a particular song, book, or video can play the media - and only on the platform's utilizing the same DRM technology used to protect the media.

This technology is somewhat limiting to consumers who may wish to play media on multiple devices in multiple locations - at home or at work, say - and many feel treads upon fair usage rights of consumers. I'd imagine that many people would find it unreasonable to purchased a CD only to find it only worked on their home CD player (but only the downstairs one, not the upstairs), and they couldn’t listen to it in their car.


Apple uses a DRM technology called FairPlay in all DRM protected media sold through it's iTunes store. In recent years, Apple has come under increasing pressure to sell DRM-free music . Apple responded that they would do so when "all of the record companies" agreed to go DRM free. In other words, "it's not us - talk to the record companies". Viewed from a game theorists perspective, this was an extremely clever move on Apple's part.


The record companies are trapped in a type prisoner's dilemma - they would all benefit if they cooperated and each one refused to allow its content to be sold on iTunes with DRM. However, each record company would have a strong incentive to defect, due to the popularity of the iPod and the massive size of the iTunes market. Therefore, the safest strategy was for each record company to "defect" and not coordinate. Apple, realizing this, can look like the good guy by putting the blame on the record companies, knowing full well how unsustainable cooperation would be.


The record companies may have found a way around this problem with the recent success of the Amazon music store. All of it's music is sold DRM-free - and as it's market share rises, it provides a context by which the aforementioned incentive to defect back to iTunes is not as great as it might have been, and gives the record companies some "breathing room" to allow the cooperation to happen . So the result is that today we have Apple starting to relent and begin to sell DRM-free music through its online store. I have no doubt this would not have been the case without other marketplaces emerging, such as Amazon, which helped change the strategic landscape.