Game Theory For Decision Support Part 2: Advanced Decision Games and Graphs

In the last post, I used a very simple game to introduce some of the concepts of advanced games. I talked about Game Theory (GT) for Decision Support Systems (DSS) and loosely defined a few terms while telling the story of the Prisoner's Dilemma:

• Heuristics

• Bias

• Dominant Strategy

• Rational and Irrational Actors

• Strategies (GT Definition)

• Nash Equilibrium

• Decision Space

• Competitive and Collaborative Strategies

• Zero-Sum Games

• Destabilizing Mutations

I concluded by introducing the disadvantages of incomplete information and the experimental process DSSs introduce into the game.

Main Points of This Post:

• Real-world games involve multiple players and happen over time, increasing the complexity of the game.

• Games can be represented using graphs.

• Graphs allow us to present games to decision-makers so they can provide expert information.

• Simple games and graphs are easy to simulate, and the DSS can run with low levels of human intervention.

• Frequent complex games provide enough data to create quality DSSs and quickly improve based on expert feedback. Over time, the level of human intervention decreases.

• Infrequent complex games have irreducible complexity. DSSs can improved decision quality but will never operate autonomously.

• Using all three approaches, we can build high-quality DSSs.