Since 2010, I’ve classified symmetrical 2 x 2 games into four categories: Harmony games, Trust games, Cooperation games, and Leadership games. That terminology is reflected in any number of posts on this blog, as well in other matrix-based work I’ve done.
I’m still very good with Leadership, but now have a quibble about Trust and bigger problems with Cooperation and Harmony.
The idea that hit me earlier today and that led to my sense I’ve got some of the names wrong: Games can/should be labeled on the basis of the attribute on the part of one or both of the players that is efficacious in optimizing in the game.
Applying the idea to the four basic types of games:
Leadership is a good term for the class of games such as Battle of the Sexes in which the best or equal best outcome is achieved through leadership by one player that is respected b y the other player.
Trust is an all right but less than best term for a class of games such as Stag Hunt in which the best outcome is achieved though one player being able to assure the other that he/she will play the jointly maximizing strategy that is best for both players. Trust can be reasonably taken to imply a reciprocity that is not necessary for the optimal outcome in these games, in which only one player need assure the other of his or her intentions. Assurance gets at that unilateral concept better than trust, and is hence a somewhat better label for these games.
Cooperation with its highly generic, imprecise associations now strikes me as a weak and overly general term to apply to a class of games consisting of the Prisoner’s Dilemma and one version of Chicken. In the PD and the relevant type of Chicken, the distinctive game property is that altruism on the part of both players solves the game cleanly. Absent mutual altruism, these games are very tough ones. The term for these games that now seems right to me is thus Altruism, or—to be more precise if also clunky about it—Mutual Altruism.
Finally, Harmony seems like a weak way to describe the games in which the dominant strategy for egoists results in the jointly best outcome. Simply put, the attribute that works to solve these games is Egoism. (Note: Altruism fails to work well in a number of them, though it does solve a number.) Hence, I would call these games Egoism games.
So, the new tetrarchy of labels for games: Egoism, Altruism, Assurance, and Leadership.
We’ll see how long this typology lasts :)*
*Maybe not too long...it occurs to me that using Egoism and Altruism as names for games creates an issue. In a few easy games both altruism and egoism solve the game; calling all these games egoism games involves an arguable bias in favor of that attribute. We could call those games Rationality games to indicate that either egoistic or altruistic calculation works to solves these games. In that case, the tetrarchy becomes a pentarchy, with Rationality added to the other four qualities that solve games. That seems right, foir now :)
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