Using game theory mathematics to resolve human conflicts
The concept of game theory has been around for several decades, and is now being applied with big data to computer-based algorithms to solve social problems. Specifically, game theory mathematics are being used by scientists and researchers to predict outcomes of humans and the conservation of the environment. Professor Nils Bunnenfeld, a social and environmental scientist at the University of Stirling (U.K.), led the EU-backed ConFooBio project, which used game theory to predict solutions to conflicts between food security and biodiversity. One of the main questions in play was, “Should we produce more food or protect a certain area for biodiversity?” A team of researchers conducted seven case studies and over 300 game workshops around the world. Case studies included conflicts between farmers and the conservation of geese in Scotland along with elephants and crop raiding in Gabon.
Another project based around the concept of game theory is Odycceus, a project coordinated by Eckehard Olbrich, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. His work focused on what social media dynamics and discussions such as language, content, and opinions can reveal about social conflicts. Particularly, he wanted to understand the reason behind the polarization of political views and growth of populist movements. The team of researchers created a tool called Penelope, an open platform accessible to researchers that would allow them to visualize social debates. For instance, it studied Twitter posts and its likes to reveal the connection between specific users and trending topics. Their findings suggested that online polarized groups were created based upon how people build their identity from their peers’ approval. In this way, how we base our decisions on other people’s decisions affects people’s political views and can create patterns of polarization.
Both of these studies use game theory analysis in hopes of creating a better understanding of social conflicts ranging from environmental sustainability to democracy and debates in the public sphere. Studies such as these use game theory to provide guidance on how people should best deal with conflicts. However, it is noted that many social conflicts are complex, and game theory itself cannot lead us to a perfect solution. With this acknowledgement, it is important to realize that game theory cannot necessarily completely solve these problems. Rather, it can help us manage them better by giving us a framework for exploring complex models of how people think. This article touches upon how the concept of game theory that we learned in class can be applied to real world problems. In class, we discussed how game theory analyzes the idea that a decision-maker’s outcome depends on the decisions made by others. We also discussed that a choice of strategies can be a social welfare maximizer (or socially optimal) if it maximizes the sum of the players’ payoffs. According to this article, these studies were conducted as an attempt to get closer to a socially optimal environment.
Source: https://phys.org/news/2022-09-game-theory-mathematics-human-conflicts.html