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Originally Posted by I am Al
I can only relate this to business, not international relations, so it may not apply. In a couple roles I've been in, I've looked at game theory and it ended up sounding better than it worked.
Sometimes it's in a persons best interest to act irrationally. At the extreme, during a riot, it may be in your best interest to join the out of control mob, with an unpredictable outcome, than stand up to them and face certain death. With only slightly different circumstances, that would likely be too nuanced to model, it may be in your best interest to stand up to the mob. IMO, those nuances make prediction of the outcome based on a game theory model difficult.
Again, just from a business standpoint, when you look at things like market behaviors, the organizations I've been around have had way better prediction outcomes with empirical approaches like A/B testing and test markets than they have with behavioral models.
I think what you can say is that people (individually or groups) that have a long track record of acting rationally, have a high probability (but not a certainty) of acting rationally in the future. People that have a track record of acting irrationally, have a high probability of continuing to act irrationally in the future. At a high level, isn't that what things like credit scoring are about - quantifying long term rational behavior?
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When I try to apply business principals and history to compare/contrast to the sovereign state, it seems a bit counterintuitive, or maybe we are just passing through a previously unseen political/sovereign "business cycle".
We are seeing some increased risk from the deconstruction of sovereign states.
In business we have typically seen mergers & acquisitions in maturing industries to achieve relative superiority and greater efficiency via economies of scale over competitors.
But it would appear that we are currently seeing a trend towards what is effectively sovereign corporate spin-offs that are both hostile and benign.
And concurrently, we are seeing sovereign corporate "employees", effectively creating competitive "semi-sovereign start-ups" in opposition to their "non-compete agreements".