Difficulties in practical application of game theory and a partial solution

M U C H effort has been devoted to development o f game theory. However, nontrivial practical applications o f discrete game theory are few. One reason may be difficulties in evaluating payoff matrices.^ Another reason may be the very l imited extent o f situations for which game solutions o f a "forcing" nature have been developed. That is, the solutions control what the players can do, according to some reasonable criterion (such as expected payoff received) rather than merely t ry ing to predict what they w i l l do. A th i rd reason may be that very little has been developed for situations where the numbers in a payoff matrix do not satisfy the arithmetic operations. As ah example, this occurs for the practically important case where the ranks o f the payoff values are the numbers in a payoff matrix. These three restraints on game theory use are discussed here. Then, attention is directed t e a new fo rm o f game' theory, based on median (rather than expected value) considerations, that is much less sensitive to these restraints. ' '" , T , .: