A FRIEND CALLED ME RECENTLY with the news that a group of scientists had just published a study on how teaspoons gradually disappear from the communal areas of offices. “Game theory!” he screamed triumphantly. I thanked him profusely, and added yet another example to my already thick file.
Game theory is all around us. Despite its name, it is not just about games—it is about the strategies that we use every day in our interactions with other people. My friends have been sending me examples from newspaper stories and their own personal experience ever since I announced my intention to write a book about it. I wanted to find out whether its surprising new insights could help us develop fresh strategies for cooperation, and to try them out for myself in environments that ranged from the polite confines of an English dinner party to baseball games, crowded sidewalks, shopping centers, congested Indian roads, and Australian outback pubs.