[ucaetano]

More of a high-level mindset, since GT is more of an academic topic.

A lot of the effects described in GT can be learned by practice and observation of human competitive behavior, but studying it gives you a much better understanding of why certain situations happen, or how competitors will react.

The market entry game (retaliate/accommodate) is usually the best example:

https://books.google.com/books?id=xhAACwAAQBAJ&pg=PA77&lpg=P...

Another example is signaling: when you publicly declare that you will match prices aggressively and will never be undercut, that's not actually a threat to your competitors, but a signal that if they keep prices high, you will as well, avoiding a price war.

[wenc]

It sounds like in your examples, ideas and conclusions from GT were used to inform practice (sort of like mental models), but GT models themselves were not explicitly deployed.

Game Theory is first and foremost a quantitative, mathematical theory, and I was wondering in what situations one would actually use the mathematics in production systems or in a mathematical analysis. There are a few replies on this thread that alluded to some applications.

[ucaetano]

> in what situations one would actually use the mathematics in production systems or in a mathematical analysis. There are a few replies on this thread that alluded to some applications.

I never worked directly with this, but auctions, resource allocation, etc. all use the mathematical tools from Game Theory.

Corporate strategy is too complex and nuanced to build hard mathematical models, so you need higher-level abstractions.

[mud_dauber]

The signaling example is quite interesting. Thank you