‘The starting point was that when we have two or more parties at loggerheads, what should we do, for example, with land or natural resources? Should we produce more food? Or should we protect a certain area for biodiversity?’ he said. His team wanted to develop a model for predicting solutions to conflicts between food security and biodiversity. Prof Bunnefeld led the EU-backed ConFooBio project, which applied game theory to scenarios where people were in conflict over resources and the environment.

‘We really see the potential to move this to a computer to make the most of the data that can be collected, but also reach many more people.’ ‘Game theory as a theoretical idea has long been around to show solutions to conflict problems,’ he said. This is particularly true in the age of big data. The Oscar-winning movie A Beautiful Mind (2001) is about the life of mathematician John Nash (played by Russell Crowe), who was awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his work in this area.Īlthough the concept has been around for many decades, the difference now is the ability to build it into computer-based algorithms, games and apps to apply it more broadly, said Professor Nils Bunnefeld, a social and environmental scientist at the University of Stirling, UK. Game theory originated in the 1940s in the field of economics. It promises a scientific approach to understanding how people make decisions and reach compromises in real-world situations. In ‘theory’, the ‘game’ will bring everyone towards an optimal solution or ‘equilibrium’. Game theory is a mathematical concept that aims to predict outcomes and solutions to an issue in which parties with conflicting, overlapping or mixed interests interact.

Real life examples of game theory