Chapter3
Zero Sum Games
In This Chapter
- Making sense of zero-sumness
- Understanding mixed strategies
- Using dominant strategies
- Formulating equilibrium solutions
As you learned in Chapter 1, when journalists and pundits call something a “zero sum game,” they are saying that a certain situation is pure conflict: one person’s gain is the other’s loss.
For game theorists, however, zero sum literally means that in every possible outcome of the game, the payoffs to the two players add up to zero. In other words, if one player has a positive payoff, the opponent must have an equal, but negative, payoff.
There is a certain constancy to real-life zero ...
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