United States. John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s book “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior” is finally finished. 1,200 pages have been sent to the publisher for publication. It will be published in 1944. The book will change the social sciences forever and will profoundly influence political and economic decisions starting in the 1950s. Von Neumann privately laments: “Economists simply don’t know what science means (…) I’m quite disgusted (…)”. Mongerstern also conveys a clear message in his introduction: “The emperor has no clothes (…) The behavior of individuals had been neglected altogether, even though their decisions in aggregate swayed the economy—just as the motion of molecules determines the bulk properties of a gas (…) sweeping generalizations had been made on the basis of very little evidence.” The modest goal of Game Theory is to begin to capture in rigorous mathematical terms such interactions between individuals and organizations, considering, for example, zero-sum games with one player, two players (with perfect information, e.g., chess, and with imperfect information, e.g., poker), special but relevant cases of games with three, four, five, and n players (where players form coalitions), and even addressing non-zero-sum games, introducing a fictitious player. One point not covered by Game Theory are games with more than two players, where coalitions do not form, either because they are prohibited by the rules or for cultural reasons. Von Neumann’s Central European mentality, in fact, leads him to believe that coalitions and alliances are the sine qua non of any theory of social organization. Fifty years after the publication of Theory of Games, John Nash won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his theories of non-cooperative games, along with two other game theorists: Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi. Von Neumann’s theories evolved in the social field, for example through the contributions of his admirer, Richard Kahnemann, also a Nobel Prize winner, who challenged the idea that human decisions are exclusively and always rational (for example, when we reason with the S1 system). They also evolved in the biological field, for example with applications in the evolution of species through competition between genes, known to the general public thanks to Richard Dawkins’s books (for example, “The Selfish Gene,” but not only).
