POL208Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Nuclear Arms Race, Spiral Model, Rationality
Document Summary
How do we increase our security without threatening others. When we fail - the spiral model of war. There are many actions and reactions to situations. Rational actors fail to cooperate even when cooperation is the optimal collective outcome. Based on all available actions, the actor has a clear ordering of preferences over all possible outcomes. Actors will choose the outcome that offers maximum utility at the minimal cost. There is no moral and no normative judgements. However there is the problem of aggregation - outcomes need to be rational across all levels of analysis. Game theories are models of social interactions as a game. Each game has structures that are based upon the actors preferences. Each actor comes up with a strategy. The outcome is based on the combination of strategies which are chosen. We look at the payouts in an ordinal way, nor cardinal. If we know the structure of the game, then we can predict the behaviour.
