Game Theory in Trump-North Korea Talks
link: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-09-17/economics-gets-it-wrong-because-research-is-hard-to-replicate
The article focuses on Trump-North Korea summit and talks about the game theory behind the several choices each country have. In particular, the article articulates game theorists’ perspective in evaluating the solution to North Korea nuclear problem. Game theorists work out a strategy by first consider the outcome of each choices, and then look backward to understand current situations. In the problem of North Korea, there may be a scenario in which NK continues nuclear experiments and able to launch intercontinental missile in a few years. There is a huge payoff for North Korea in this case, and not good for US and South Korea. However, starting preemptive wars on North Korea is also not necessarily a good idea, because there are so many possibilities of how a war ends, and one misread or wrong decision may end up with a totally different result. The stability for an attack is too low to be preferred, but there also seem to be no other good choices. At this point, the author describes U.S. situation as the “zugzwang” in chess where all possible moves for a player would lead to bad positions and the player would rather prefer not to move. But since each player must move in their turn, “zugzwang” becomes a dilemma is choose the least painful move.
I would hardly say there are no better solutions to North Korea nuclear problem, and also would not agree on author’s suggestion for Chinese intervention, but purely in the perspective of game theory, U.S should analyze the payoffs for each choices carefully and build the game theory models that we talked about in class. U.S should also predict how North Korea would react and what roles other countries will play in this highly dynamic situation, and then choose the best solution – if there is a dominant strategy or best response – according to game theory.