Game Theory is being used to Accurately Predict Political Changes
http://www.economist.com/node/21527025
This article from The Economist is about Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, who uses game theory to successfully make predictions about large-scale political situations. He predicted the downfall of Hosni Mubarak and Pervez Musharraff, as well as Ayatullah Khomeini’s successor. He uses computers to simulate the decisions and utility functions of each party who plays an influential role in these situations. The scale of these analyses – the number of dimensions involved in these analyses – is mind-boggling.
Similar code is, according to the article, widely used in many fields from divorce negotiation to defense and counter-terrorism. The article examines how game theory has pervaded decision-making for many companies in various fields, whose behaviour is informed by game theoretic simulations of the market and the decisions of their competitors. The article makes the case that such computer programs give people more information about the systems they are involved in and enable them to simulate the outcome of many events. It posits that this spread of information, via programs that use game theory to simulate real-world decisions, reduces the incidence of conflict in any system.