Rusty succotash
Over on Cheap Talk, Jeff recounts being taught game theory by Matthew Rabin:
As if to remove all illusion that what we were studying was connected to reality, every game we analyzed in class was given a name according to his system of “stochastic lexicography.” Stochastic lexicography means randomly picking two words out of the dictionary and using them as the name of the game under study. So, for example, instead of studying “job market signaling” we studied something like “rusty succotash.”
I like this idea. To some extent, it reminds me of the operational names used in military and police circles, such as the Met’s ‘Operation Bumblebee’ or ‘Operation Trident’. Working in the government policy process and knowing the degree to which a scheme for X may end up actually being a scheme for Y (but still called the X Scheme) I would welcome the neutrality of abstract nomenclature.
