Insight. Applied.
Trust seems to be a rare commodity these days.
Game theory helps us understand how distrust grows within a society and—encouragingly—suggest ways in which we might stop the rot.
Nicky Case has brought this dry subject matter to life via a wonderful interactive description of how (dis)trust evolves.
It’s about 30 minutes long. Just play it.
Security expert Bruce Schneier believes that a game-theoretic assessment of whether to release the Trump dossier supports release—regardless of your political affiliation or whether you believe the contents.
That’s the thing with formal analysis—it clarifies the situation and, sometimes, results in a trivial decision-making process.
An article in last week’s New Scientist reports that conservation policies are driving villagers to kill protected wildlife—including elephants and tigers.
Government conservation policies restrict use of ancestral lands which causes resentment among villagers. In some cases this resentment manifests itself in the illegal killing of the very animals that the policies are designed to protect.
Unintended consequences.
The problem is that the policies are created without the involvement of the villagers. Stakeholders, such as the villagers, are not “background data”. They are active participants—and they will react to changes in a situation.
Any solution to a problem that involves multiple stakeholders (…pretty much any problem…) must consider reactions…reactions to reactions…and so on….as an integral part of the analysis. Tools such as game theory and confrontation analysis are designed to explicitly address these reactions and, as such, are essential to any serious attempt at decision modeling.