Game Theory and the Kingdom of God (A Quirky Series Installment), Part 1: "Utility"


Welcome to my first "Quirky Series" (I just invented the idea). A Quirky Series is when I will use a fairly odd lens to make some fairly obvious points. That is, I'm going to go to a lot of work to draw a conclusion that could have been make much more directly and conventionally. So, why will a Quirky Series exist and why should you read?

As for reading, that is up to you. As for why I'm going to write a Quirky Series, well, I like to play around with ideas. I like using ideas from one area and using them in another to see what can be seen. You never know what you might find. I can't promise any new insights will emerge in this Quirky Series, but something interesting might emerge. It'll be an adventure to find out.

In this Quirky Series, I want to use the lens of game theory to examine theological and ecclesial issues. Let the fun begin!


Game theory is a branch of applied mathematics that formally began in 1944 with the book "The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior" by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. In popular culture most are familiar with game theory through the movie A Beautiful Mind and John Nash's story of winning the Nobel Prize in Economics for his discovery of the Nash equilibrium in the field of game theory.

Social scientists have used game theory to uncover a variety of behavioral dynamics. I myself am not a game theorist, but in my classes I have used its findings and way of approaching problems to illustrate various aspects of human psychology. Some of these observations provide an interesting perspective on certain theological and church-related issues.

If this series is interesting to you, follow up with some of these books:

A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar
The Prisoner's Dilemma by William Poundstone
Game Theory : A Nontechnical Introduction by Morton D. Davis
The Complete Strategyst : Being a Primer on the Theory of Games of Strategy by J. D. Williams
The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod

Very briefly, game theory is a way of mathematically understanding decision-making. As a branch of mathematics, game theory often yields an analysis of the optimal, rational decision. In real life, people often do not follow the path suggested by game theoretic analyses. This divergence of theory and real-life behavior is, in itself, an object of study. Social scientists are very interested in scenarios where people appear to behave "irrationally" and game theory has helped us find some of those situations.

Game theory really isn't about games as we commonly understand them. "Game" in game theory means an abstract situation where a "player" is faced with two or more "choices" or "moves." Those choices then have "outcomes" or "payoffs." Given this abstract structure, any of our life choices can be viewed as a "game" where my choices have consequences.

The heart of game theory involves issues of utility. Your utility is your amount of satisfaction or happiness given the outcomes of your choices in the "game of life." Your utility is typically manifested in your "preferences." That is, you would prefer some outcomes over others. If your preferences meet certain mathematical requirements then game theory provides a mathematical means of calculating which choices you should make to "maximize your utility," that is, to get the most out of life.

The trouble is, our preferences and our choices in life are often too fluid and fluctuating for game theory to be of any practical use to us. (Although I did use game theory once to decide if I should continue to skip boring meetings at ACU. My moves were "skip meeting" versus "attend meeting." The meetings were designated as either "important" or "trivial." I then listed my preferences for missing an important meeting versus missing a trivial meeting versus attending an important meeting versus attending a trivial meeting given the frequency of each meeting type. The outcome of the analysis: Keep skipping meetings.) Rather, game theory is useful in analyzing decisions in an abstract, theoretical way. This kind of analysis is useful as a comparison with real life. Even if real life diverges from the game theoretic analysis, the analysis enables us to go searching for the phenomena in the first place.

So, the first thing that I'd like us to think about is this: What is your utility?

Game theory assumes we are all "utility maximizers," which is just a complicated way of saying that if I have two choices in front of me I'll pick the one that makes me most "happy." But here is the thing I've been thinking about lately, Do we really know what will make us happy? If you look at our lives, we do all kinds of things that don't make us happy. So why do we do these things? Why do we make such stupid choices when we know it is a stupid choice to begin with?

Game theorists would suggest that all we should do, to infer your utility, is to simply watch your choices. In your behavior we observe your true preferences. If so, that is a challenging premise. When I do that "stupid" thing is there something in me that really wanted it?

So, I leave you today with a question: What do you really want? Verbal answers aside, if we sent a game theorist to follow you around for a week, how would she compute your utility as she watched your life choices? Do your really want to lose weight? Do you really want to help the poor? Do you really want to live more simply? Do you really want to spend more time with God? Do you really want to be a better person?

What do you REALLY want?

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