What Game Theory Tells Us About Donald Trump
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/what-game-theory-tells-us-about-donald-trump-20160511
This Rolling Stone article from May investigates the game theory behind Donald Trump’s rise in the Republican primary and what to expect in his battle against Hillary Clinton. Trump’s rise can be attributed to his (politically) unconventional way of dealing with people who comment on him. Those who praise him get even higher praise in return, and those who deride him get aggressively showered in insults. The article points out instances where this strategy hasn’t worked for him, most notably his feud with Megyn Kelly and insulting of John McCain’s war record. However, this strategy has worked well for him. None of the other 16 Republican candidates could adjust to his uniquely aggressive style, so one of the biggest underdogs in the race was able to beat out the Washington veterans. However, the article also shows how Hillary Clinton can take advantage of this strategy to make Trump destroy himself. Now that Hillary has seen Trump’s style, she can adjust her own to produce better results against him. She can have her supporters and surrogates attack Trump in an effort to elicit insults from Trump that will hurt him among undecided voters, without ever giving him a chance to counterattack Hillary herself. It will be interesting to see if Hillary takes this route to defeat Trump’s primaries strategy, or if the Trump attack machine out-slugs her as it did the 16 other Republican hopefuls.
This article relates to our study of game theory in two player games from the September 2nd lecture. In that lecture we were introduced to game theory and the prisoner’s dilemma. Donald Trump’s strategy thus far, as described above, exactly resembles the 1980 computer program, Tit for Tat, that outmaneuvered all other participants in a prisoner’s dilemma tournament. Tit for Tat simply answered each player’s last move with the same move. For example, if the player snitched in the previous round, the Tit for Tat program would retaliate by snitching on them in the current round. Donald Trump has employed this strategy so far, as evidenced by his high praise for Vladimir Putin after Putin praised him, and his vicious attacks against any reporter that speaks ill of him. This strategy paid off for Trump in the primaries, as the other Republican hopefuls either refused to engage in his game and disappeared, or entered the tit for tat game and were crushed by Trump’s insults. Whether this will work against Hillary Clinton is yet to be determined, but it is certainly interesting that a 36 year old solution to the simplest problem in game theory was powerful enough to propel a major underdog to an impressive primary win.