You Sank is a short story by Jack Rusher, published here Tuesday, February 01, 2005. It is part of Stories.
We play the games we know.
They sit at opposite ends of a small table. On the table is a children’s parlour game — the one where there’s a screen in the middle so that neither player can see the other’s position.
A game theorist would refer to this sort of play as a game of imperfect knowledge, which means that it differs from a game in which the positions of the players are known, like chess.
“Your move,” she says, looking over the divider with keen, shining eyes.
In games of imperfect knowledge — Poker, for instance — multiple competing players must calculate risk, make guesses about the intentions of other players, and overcome unreliable information and deception.
He plugs a small plastic game piece into his board and announces the coordinates he has chosen.
Economists also concern themselves with systems that feature decision making within an environment of imperfect knowledge.
Her expression darkens and she explains that his move has made her feel unloved.
In fact, although most economic theory is based on the discredited notion that each person is a rational and informed actor, it has recently been shown that no person is completely rational, nor in possession of perfect knowledge.
On her turn she takes evasive action, placing her chit in the board and telling him its location.
To make matters worse, knowledge is not spread evenly among the players. This asymmetry of information makes it quite difficult for consumers to make good decisions — about which pain medication may have lethal side effects or whether social security is really in need of privatization, for instance.
Declaring the damage done by her move, he says, “I feel trapped and bored.”
The economists Akerlof, Spence and Stiglitz won a collective Nobel Prize in 2001 for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information, while Daniel Kahneman won half of the 2002 Nobel Prize for his work on “bounded rationality”.
The players continue like this until the game is played to its logical conclusion.