Reverse Game Theory

Description

“If you can rewrite incentives, you can build cooperation almost anywhere.”

HennyGe Wichers:

"Traditional game theory assumes that the rules are fixed — the chessboard is set, the laws codified — and asks how rational people will behave within them. It predicts outcomes based on existing incentives. Mechanism design turns that question around: It asks, for example, what rules should we write to get a different outcome — say, preservation and housing?

The idea emerged in the 1960s and has since led to the awarding of two Nobel Prizes. One went to its intellectual forefather, economist William Vickrey, who shared the prize with the economist James A. Mirrlees in 1996. Vickrey’s work on auction design is still used today to sell everything from telecoms bandwidth to online advertising space. Another Nobel, in 2007, went to the economists Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson, who laid the foundations of the field.

What united these economists was engineering. They all treated cooperation as a design challenge rather than a test of moral character or will. The idea frames progress as a structural problem and offers some optimism: Conflict isn’t inevitable. If we can make cooperation the rational choice, we shift from analyzing the game to designing it."

(https://www.noemamag.com/the-architecture-of-cooperation/?)