Generalized Game Theory - Overview

Overview

In generalized game theory, games are conceptualized as rule complexes, which is a set containing rules and/or other rule complexes. However, the rules may be imprecise, inconsistent, and even dynamic. Distinctions in the properties and functions of different types of rules allows the rules themselves to be analyzed in complex ways, and thus the models of the theory more closely represent relationships and institutions investigated in the social sciences.

The ways in which the rules may be changed is developed within the context of generalized game theory based on the principle of rule revision and game restructuring. These types of games are referred to as open games, that is, games which are open to transformation. Games which have specified, fixed players, fixed preference structures, fixed optimization procedures, and fixed action alternatives and outcomes are called closed games (characteristic of most classical game theory models).

Because its premises derive from social theory generalized game theory emphasizes and provides cultural and institutional tools for game conceptualization and analysis, what Granovetter (1985) refers to as the social embeddedness of interaction and social and economic processes. This is in contrast to conceptualization of games consisting of actors which are autonomous utility maximizers. Further, the modeling of the actors themselves in generalized game theory is especially open to the use of concepts such as incomplete information and bounded rationality.

Proponents of generalized game theory have advocated the application of the theory to reconceptualizing individual and collective decision-making, resolutions of the prisoners' dilemma game, agent-based modeling, fuzzy games, conflict resolution procedures, challenging and providing robust and normatively grounded alternatives to Nash equilibrium and Pareto optimality, among others.