On Some Criticisms of Game Theory

摘要

Game theory is a mathematical model of certain situations of human conflict and cooperation. As in all models there are severe simplifications; if these are found to be undesirable they have to be replaced by others or additional elements have to be introduced, thereby complicating the model, possibly beyond the degree of complication which we are able to manage at present. The demand to consider such other elements is typical of certain critics such as Zuckerman, Blackett etc. but they have not developed any methods with which to study additional complications. Instead, recourse is had to exhortations, to appeal to 'intuition', 'experience', 'judgement' etc. which remain unanalyzed and therefore have little operational meaning. If a rigorous theory is rejected as inadequate for analyzing a problem a less rigorous procedure can lead to better or equivalent results only by accident. There are many genuine, open problems in game theory, especially there exists the need to give an existence proof of solutions for arbitrary large n-person games. The author outlines many other unsolved problems but expresses confidence that they too will find answers as have those which characterize the development of the theory since 1944. (Author)