The World the Game Theorists Made

This book is about the history of game theory – roughly speaking, a mathematical theory of interaction between rational individuals – during the Cold War era. While game theory today is most commonly associated with the discipline of economics, during this earlier period the theory was appropriated and adapted by researchers in a wide range of contexts, from military-funded mathematics and operations research to interdisciplinary “behavioral science,” “conflict resolution,” even evolutionary biology. In the process, game theory found itself at the heart of a broader series of debates: about whether mathematical theories of decision-making could rationalize policy on matters from military budgeting to nuclear strategy; whether they might realistically describe the way we reason and choose; or whether they could serve as the foundation for a positive “theory” of social behavior on par with the achievements of mathematics in the physical sciences. Despite repeated waves of optimism about game theory’s ability to guide, describe, or predict, its spread has often been sporadic, marked by repeated disappointments as the uses and limitations of the theory came into sharper focus. Rather, game theory’s power and persistence emerges in this account from its ability to provide a rich stock of notations, metaphors, and, broadly speaking, “theoretical tools” that have their own unique appeal in different intellectual contexts, but that as a whole helped catalyze a new world of intellectual connections between activities and areas of research that had previously been separate.