Game-Changer: Game Theory and the Art of Transforming Strategic Situations - Hardcover

McAdams, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393239675 ISBN 13: 9780393239676

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014

Synopsis

A radically new, and easily learned, way to outstrategize your rivals.

“The wise win before they fight, while the ignorant fight to win.” So wrote Zhuge Liang, the great Chinese military strategist. He was referring to battlefield tactics, but the same can be said about any strategic situation. Even seemingly certain defeat can be turned into victory―whether in battle, business, or life―by those with the strategic vision to recognize how to “change the game” to their own advantage.

The aim of David McAdams’s Game-Changer is nothing less than to empower you with this wisdom―not just to win in every strategic situation (or “game”) you face but to change those games and the ecosystems in which they reside to transform your life and our lives together for the better.

Game-Changer develops six basic ways to change games―commitment, regulation, cartelization, retaliation, trust, and relationships―enlivened by countless colorful characters and unforgettable examples from the worlds of business, medicine, finance, military history, crime, sports, and more.

The book then digs into several real-world strategic challenges, such as how to keep prices low on the Internet, how to restore the public’s lost trust in for-charity telemarketers, and even how to save mankind from looming and seemingly unstoppable drug-resistant disease. In each case, McAdams uses the game-theory approach developed in the book to identify the strategic crux of the problem and then leverages that “game-awareness” to brainstorm ways to change the game to solve or at least mitigate the underlying problem.

So get ready for a fascinating journey. You’ll emerge a deeper strategic thinker, poised to change and win all the games you play. In doing so, you can also make the world a better place. “Just one Game-Changer [is] enough to seed and transform an entire organization into a more productive, happier, and altogether better place,” McAdams writes. Just imagine what we can do together.

30 illustrations

About this title

About the Author

David McAdams is professor of business administration at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and economics professor at Duke. Holding a PhD from Stanford's Graduate School of Business and previously associate professor at MIT Sloan, he is a distinguished scholar in microeconomic theory and game theory. McAdams applies his expertise to consulting in market design and strategic business challenges, aiding various firms in auction strategies and mission-critical decisions. He has authored Game-Changer: Game Theory and the Art of Transforming Strategic Situations (Norton, 2014) and instructs MBA and PhD courses on game theory and market design at Duke.

Reviews

As a game-theory business consultant, McAdams sees the game in everything, from the Cold War to the aisles of your supermarket. In a classic mind experiment called the prisoners’ dilemma, he describes the options and four possible outcomes of the confessions of two separated prisoners using a so-called payoff matrix. Each player has a dominant strategy to confess that will maximize his or her own payoff of reduced jail time regardless of the other’s move, yet if they both confess, this advantage is nullified. This dilemma is used throughout the book to illustrate game tactics involved in football, battles of war, the ban on cigarette advertising, competitive pricing strategies, antibiotics resistance, fund-raising, and even the secrecy of the Mafia. McAdams shows how forces such as regulation, trust, and relationships allow marketers to break free of the prisoners’ dilemmas to provide products and services at competitive yet profitable prices. This is an eye-opening treatise on how game theory can help you solve problems not only in the business world but in everyday life as well. --David Siegfried

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393239675
• ISBN 13: 9780393239676
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304