Christien Chalfant
Wendigo
Game theory is basically bogus anyway.
It seemed like that when he started talking about it. But I need to get some good constructive ideas about what Game Theory actually is so that I don't believe the idiot(s) that talk about it falsely.
I need....the facts
ninja Once upon a time, there was a subject area studied by academics at the higher levels called "political economy."
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Political economy emerged as a distinct field of study in the mid-18th century, largely as a reaction to mercantilism, when the Scottish philosophers Adam Smith (1723–90) and David Hume (1711–76) and the French economist François Quesnay (1694–1774) began to approach this study in systematic rather than piecemeal terms. They took a secular approach, refusing to explain the distribution of wealth and power in terms of God’s will and instead appealing to political, economic, technological, natural, and social factors and the complex interactions between them. Indeed, Smith’s landmark work—An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), which provided the first comprehensive system of political economy—conveys in its title the broad scope of early political economic analysis. Although the field itself was new, some of the ideas and approaches it drew upon were centuries old. It was influenced by the individualist orientation of the English political philosophers Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and John Locke (1632–1704), the Realpolitik of the Italian political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), and the inductive method of scientific reasoning invented by the English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626).
Many works by political economists in the 18th century emphasized the role of individuals over that of the state and generally attacked mercantilism. This is perhaps best illustrated by Smith’s famous notion of the “invisible hand,” in which he argued that state policies often were less effective in advancing social welfare than were the self-interested acts of individuals. Individuals intend to advance only their own welfare, Smith asserted, but in so doing they also advance the interests of society as if they were guided by an invisible hand. Arguments such as these gave credence to individual-centred analysis and policies to counter the state-centred theories of the mercantilists.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/467600/political-economy
One day, in the mid 1940s, German economist Oskar Morgenstern wrote a book. The book was called "The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior," and it drew on an earlier work by Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann.
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game theory, branch of applied mathematics that provides tools for analyzing situations in which parties, called players, make decisions that are interdependent. This interdependence causes each player to consider the other player’s possible decisions, or strategies, in formulating his own strategy. A solution to a game describes the optimal decisions of the players, who may have similar, opposed, or mixed interests, and the outcomes that may result from these decisions.
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Game theory has been applied to a wide variety of situations in which the choices of players interact to affect the outcome. In stressing the strategic aspects of decision making, or aspects controlled by the players rather than by pure chance, the theory both supplements and goes beyond the classical theory of probability. It has been used, for example, to determine what political coalitions or business conglomerates are likely to form, the optimal price at which to sell products or services in the face of competition, the power of a voter or a bloc of voters, whom to select for a jury, the best site for a manufacturing plant, and the behaviour of certain animals and plants in their struggle for survival. It has even been used to challenge the legality of certain voting systems.
It would be surprising if any one theory could address such an enormous range of “games,” and in fact there is no single game theory. A number of theories have been proposed, each applicable to different situations and each with its own concepts of what constitutes a solution. This article describes some simple games, discusses different theories, and outlines principles underlying game theory. Additional concepts and methods that can be used to analyze and solve decision problems are treated in the article optimization.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/224893/game-theory?anchor=ref386139
The root of the theory is that all human behavior is simple enough to reduce to mathematics, since human beings are machines designed on a common blueprint rather than people with different backgrounds, temperaments, experiences, and beliefs who make their own choices when faced with unfamiliar situations.