Strategic Interaction: Games, Deterrence, and Power

Game theory entered international relations scholarship substantially through the work of economist Thomas Schelling, whose The Strategy of Conflict, published in 1960, applied formal models of strategic interaction to problems of bargaining, deterrence, and crisis behavior, work for which he later shared the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The prisoner's dilemma, a two-player game in which each actor's individually rational choice to defect produces a jointly worse outcome than mutual cooperation would, became a widely used model for explaining why sovereign states, even when cooperation would benefit both, often fail to achieve it under anarchy, since neither side can be certain the other will not defect first. Robert Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation, published in 1984, extended this framework by showing through computer tournaments that a simple "tit-for-tat" strategy, cooperating first and then mirroring the other player's previous move, could sustain cooperation in repeated interactions.