Crisis and Control

Abstract

Whose judgment do we trust and why are questions that have always preoccupied collective action problems and strategic decision-making. For this purpose, game theoretics (see Hollis 1998; Nash 1950; Putnam 1988; von Neumann and Morgenstern 1944) have been widely applied in numerous forms, and across multiple disciplines, to explain various scenarios where interactions depend on some degree of confidence in another actor. Overstretching rationality and an innate calculative capacity of humans to maximize utility through abstract hypothetical tests has proven attractive because, as Duncan Snidal (1985: 25; original italics) contends, ‘the ultimate payoff of game theory is the use of game models to understand different aspects of international politics in terms of a unified theory’. Increasingly sophisticated and precisely formulated models give the impression of game theory as a ‘unifying force in the social sciences…capable of being applied to the understanding of all interactions between conscious beings’ (Howard 1971: 202). So pervasive has formal modeling become — especially in the Anglo-American world — that it has penetrated, to varying degrees, most socio-economic spaces (Power 2004). Stephen Walt (1999: 5) observes how: Elite academic departments are now expected to include game theorists and other formal modelers in order to be regarded as ‘up to date,’ graduate students increasingly view the use of formal rational choice models as a prerequisite for professional advancement, and research employing rational choice methods is becoming more widespread throughout the discipline.