In the late 1940s and
early 1950s I was a participant in international
negotiations and developed some ideas that, when I
left Government in 1953 to join the faculty of Yale,
I thought I’d work on. Eventually I published an
“Essay on Bargaining” in which I explored the
concept of “commitment,” how one may (or may fail
to) adopt a bargaining position that he or she is
obliged or motivated to adhere to and—crucially
important—communicate that obligation or motivation
in credible manner to another party. I explored
promises, threats, and bargaining tactics, looked at
contract, reputation, appeals to a deity, physical
positioning (burning bridges), uses of agents.
I also looked at
coordination when payoffs to two or more parties
were identical but equilibria were multiple (or
infinite), and when payoffs were asymmetrical but
dependent on coordination.
I was convinced that
coordination of expectations was often crucial to
the completion of overt negotiation.
I had just enough
acquaintance with game theory to realize that what I
was doing might be construed as game theory, but not
enough to be tempted to formalize any of my ideas as
game theory. I late 1957, after I had finished that
work, I came upon Games and Decisions (1957),
by R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa, and spent a
hundred hours learning game theory.
Immediately after, I
spent eight months in London on a fellowship and
worked further on the same kinds of ideas, with some
intention to relate them explicitly to game theory,
having absorbed enough from the Luce-Raiffa book to
feel sure of the connection. I felt that game
theory, as I had come across it, was more abstract
than it needed to be and could usefully be enlarged
in scope to encompass strategies and tactics of
bargaining, becoming empirical and historical as
well as logical and mathematical. I was
presumptuous enough to subtitle my article, as
published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution
(1958), “Prospectus for a Reorientation of Game
Theory.” (Of course, nobody took it up.) In that
article I used a few payoff matrices, mostly 2x2,
without thinking that that was what made it game
theory.
It was during my stay in
London that I worked on a problem that intrigued me,
which I called the “reciprocal fear of surprise
attack,” and began to realize that the reciprocal
deterrence between the USA and the USSR was the
highest priority for my interests. I had agreed to
join the RAND Corporation for a year, and during
1958-59 I began a professional interest in
nuclear-weapons policy and arms control that
preoccupied me for the next decade. I did, at RAND,
produce a couple of articles (included in my 1960
book, The Strategy of Conflict) that were
explicitly game theory. Mainly I learned about
nuclear weapons technology and policy.
I then produced many
articles and two books on nuclear defense strategy
and arms control. None of that work looked like
“game theory,” although it was of the same nature as
my earlier work that used some game-theoretical
terminology and simple matrices. I also worked on
criminal coercion and “organized crime,” on somewhat
game-theoretic strategies of self-management or self
control, on racial segregation, and on multi-person
interactions like self-confirming expectations,
multi-person prisoners’ dilemmas, dual-equilibrium
binary multi-person choices, and situations
embodying the “fallacy of composition.” I think the
latter work can be construed as many-person game
theory but in no way depended on formal game
theory.
I was surprised and
somewhat perplexed when the Nobel selection
committee for economic sciences awarded me the Bank
of Sweden Prize in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2005
“for having deepened our understanding of conflict
and cooperation through game-theoretic analysis.”
I thought I had contributed to an understanding of
conflict and cooperation; I thought in 1958 my work
might usefully be construed as game-theoretic
analysis; I thought in 2005 that, excepting
possibly my development of coordination theory and
“focal points,” what I did was not recognizable as
game theory. Maybe the committee was trying to
redefine game theory by incorporating my work, much
as I had futilely tried in 1958.
Still, if game theory is
to be identified with the formal logic of rationally
identifying and choosing strategies in equilibrium,
and its attendant definition of payoffs and use of
matrix notation, I am a user of game theory, not a
creator. In most disciplines there is a distinction
between “theorists” and professionals, or
practitioners. There are economists but also
economic theorists; there are sociologists but also
sociological theorists; there are statisticians and
statistical theorists, even physicists and
theoretical physicists. But game theory, unlike
economics, or sociology, or statistics or physics,
has “theory” in its name. We don’t have a term like
“gameist” for the one who uses game theory, the way
economists use economic theory without necessarily
producing theory as economic “theorists” do.
I believe I can
distinguish what I do from what game theorists do in
the following two ways. One is that most game
theory is concerned with identifying rational choice
when the optimal choice depends on the choice, or
choices, that another is, or others are, anticipated
to make. Except for my work on coordination theory,
I have been, I believe, almost entirely concerned
with how individuals rationally attempt to
influence, not to anticipate,
the choices of others. And, second,
while I have tried to identify the logic of tactics
of influence—unilateral promises, reciprocal
promises, threats, commitments, the elimination of
options, hostages, contracts, appeals to higher
authority, etc.—I have been mainly concerned with
empirical (or sometimes fictional) and historical
evidence of behavior. I have been more
“descriptive” than “normative”.
Most game theory
considers such things as commitments, threats,
promises, contracts, etc., to be either enforceable
or not enforceable; I have been mainly concerned
with how and where and by whom in what institutional
environments threats, promises, and commitments can
be successfully incurred, or successfully bluffed,
or successfully countered. I am more social
scientists than logician.
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