Dinhternet

So yes­ter­day, after that post about my stut­ter­ing psych pro­fes­sor, I went to my econ class. I knew Albert was going to be there, but I didn’t know David Y would be there too. But the best sur­prise was this: my econ pro­fes­sor also stut­ters. And on top of that, he has a Ger­man accent. In fact, I would say he’s quite new to Amer­ica, because he sched­uled a midterm on the day of Thanksgiving.

It wasn’t so bad, though. Unlike my first pro­fes­sor, I think this one was just stut­ter­ing because he was ner­vous, and he stopped halfway through lec­ture. Also, since the class is about game the­ory, we got to play some inter­est­ing games the first day. In fact, he put his own money on the line for a game to make it more inter­est­ing for us.

Here’s the rules: every­one writes down a num­ber between 0 and 100 on a piece of paper and turns it in. The per­son who is clos­est to two-thirds of the aver­age of the num­bers wins! The pro­fes­sor used that as a weeder, and then played heads-up against the class win­ner of that round for $5 of his own money. (The stu­dent put noth­ing on the line.)

What num­bers would you pick in that sce­nario? (Keep in mind that you do not know the other play­ers at all, and you prob­a­bly can’t guess what they will pick with any sort of accu­racy, unless you are a con man with an uncanny abil­ity to cold read peo­ple.) Would you pick the same num­bers for both rounds?

Open the spoiler sec­tion to see the strat­egy behind the game.
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