Dr. Ram C. Rao doesn’t want to give too much away about his forthcoming Polykarp Kusch lecture. He will say he thinks that it will be thoughtprovoking, fun and mindexpanding, too.

In large measure, “the things you are encountering in everyday life are what I’m going to be talking about,” he assures, and he promises to show some “really fun stuff in game theory.”

The lecture is this Friday, April 15, at 1 p.m. in the UT Dallas McDermott Library Auditorium.

While game theory is a comparatively new field of study that took hold in the realm of mathematics, it has made inroads into psychology, biology and several other disciplines, including economics and management — Rao’s turf.

About the Polykarp Kusch
Lecture Series

Polykarp Kusch

Polykarp Kusch was the 1955 Nobel laureate in physics. He joined UT Dallas in 1972 and was a UT System Regental Professor.

He served on the University’s physics faculty until he retired and was accorded professor emeritus status in 1982.

His science career was marked by a delight in teaching and research, and he connected with his students in countless ways, including via presentations of physics experiments in his “Phenomena of Nature” classes.

When he retired, the University endowed a program of annual lectures with the theme Concerns of the Lively Mind in his honor.

Hearing the Lecture

Kusch lectures are free and open to the public. Dr. Ram C. Rao speaks Friday, April 15, at 1 p.m. in the Eugene McDermott Library Auditorium on The University of Texas at Dallas campus. For additional information, call 972-883-2272.

A Founders Professor and professor of marketing in the School of Management, Rao says game theory underpins his work. “What it is,” he explains, “is a way of modeling the interactions of multiple decision-makers. … Game theory provides a framework to think about what they might do or what we might expect them to do or what they should do. … Game theory is like a tool to examine that interaction.”

Rao, whose game-theory courses are part of SOM’s doctoral program, is a leading scholar in the use of gametheory analysis to study the competitive effect of advertising, promotions and pricing on firms’ strategies and profits. Recently he has considered issues related to supermarket and other retail competition and how retailers should formulate competitive strategies relative to pricing.

Although game theory dates as far back as the early 1700s, “its real force in management and economics has been in the last 40 or 50 years,” Rao says. That roughly coincides with the length of his career and when his gametheory interest started. “Some of us got lucky,” he says. “We got in on the ground floor, so to speak.”

He says the “Perfection” in his lecture title, “From Perfection to Retail Competition,” involves wordplay on “perfectness,” a gametheory concept.

“My very first encounter with game theory involved perfectness,” he says, “which was sort of unknown at the time. … So that’s where I started getting interested in gametheoretic ideas.”

“Retail Competition” refers to how, “over the years, I’ve used ideas in game theory, including perfectness [and] another idea called mixed strategies to apply to marketing problems, in particular, retail competition.” he says.

He plans to use his lecture to link game theory to important ideas in management, but much of what he has to say will tread recognizable territory. “The context is very familiar,” Rao says. “For example, prices at supermarkets – I’m going to spend quite a bit of time on that.”

Listeners are going “to get a dose of pricing and competition and little stories along the way,” he says, “about some of the people that came into my life and how I got interested in some things, and how I didn’t know how to do certain things.”

There will be in his speech, Rao says, “an excitement about ordinary things.”

“Even the familiar things I’m going to be talking about, I’m hoping that I can share why it’s been exciting for me.”