The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

RULE 4: Having exhausted the simple avenues of looking for dominant strategies or ruling out dominated ones, next search all the cells of the game table for a pair of mutual best responses in the same cell, which is a Nash equilibrium of the game.

RULE 3: Eliminate from consideration any dominated strategies and strategies that are never best responses, and go on doing so successively.

“Pick the most beautiful” might be the stated rule, but that could be significantly more difficult than picking the redhead, or the one with an interesting gap between her two front teeth (Lauren Hutton) or the mole (Cindy Crawford). Anything that distinguishes becomes a focal point and allows people’s expectations to converge. For this reason, we should not be surprised that many of the world’s top models do not have perfect features; rather, they are almost perfect but have some interesting flaw that gives their look a personality and a focal point.

Such an outcome in a game, where the action of each player is best for him given his beliefs about the other’s action, and the action of each is consistent with the other’s beliefs about it, neatly squares the circle of thinking about thinking. Therefore it has a good claim to be called a resting point of the players’ thought processes, or an equilibrium of the game. Indeed, this is just a definition of Nash equilibrium.

A player is said to have a dominant strategy if that same strategy is better for him than all of his other available strategies no matter what strategy or strategy combination the other player or players choose.

salami tactics; you defuse the threat one slice at a time

salami tactics; you defuse the threat one slice at a time.

Cutting off communication succeeds as a credible commitment device because it can make an action truly irreversible

the strategy that Schelling called brinkmanship.* The term is often interpreted as taking an adversary to the brink of disaster in order to get him to blink first

For a threat or promise to have its desired effect, the other player must believe it.