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.
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