You must be familiar with the mention of game theory. Every business school offers game theory courses to MBAs. It is said that this is a subject that smart people like. He has won the Nobel Prize for game theory 8 times so far. But in my opinion, we ordinary people should learn some game theory. Why? Because each of us spends his entire life dealing with people, and game theory studies the interaction between people. Once we understand game theory, we will also understand how we should get along with others.
Before talking about the specific content of game theory, I must first clarify something. The word "game" is very popular. But many things can easily lose their shape and deviate from their original meaning once they become popular. Game theory is no exception. When many people talk about games, they mean struggle, conflict, winning or losing, life and death. This is the biggest misunderstanding of game theory in my life.
In fact, the core of the game is not life and death, but learning to understand. Understand each other's concepts and actions, and then guide your own actions. Just respond to each other and continue playing the game together.
What situation will make it impossible for us to play each other’s games? Nothing else but wishful thinking.
For example, Tang Monk came up and identified the White Bone Demon as a "female Bodhisattva"; another example is that some people around me like to think "I don't care what the world does, I just want to be happy." This is all typical wishful thinking. We do not live in a vacuum, so what is the outcome of wishful thinking? Tang Seng's ending must have been taken away by the Bone Demon; and for those who feel that they can escape from the truth of the world and be happy on their own, their happiness is equivalent to the happiness of free fall. Sooner or later, it will be slapped on the ground one day, and it will not be too late. .
So, only by letting go of wishful thinking and trying to think from the other side’s perspective can we grasp the essence of the game.
However, wishful thinking is not enough. Understanding between people still faces many difficulties. Is there any way to help us solve this "understanding" problem?
Today, we will use game theory to break it. Real-life problems are all kinds of strange, but when broken down, the key to "understanding" is nothing more than solving two major challenges:
First, how can I make the other party understand me?
Second, how can I understand the other person?
Speaking of this, I think of what Confucius said in "The Analects", "If you don't worry about others, you don't want to worry about yourself; if you don't worry about others, you don't know others" ("The Analects of Confucius·Xue Er Pian" 1.16), which is also true. There are two sides to this question.
Let’s talk about the first question first.
Let’s tell a story first. Many people may also know that "Warring States Policy" records a story about "a thousand gold buys a horse bone". It is said that someone spent a lot of money to buy a thousand-mile horse, but after waiting for three years, he still couldn't buy it. One of his friends came to him and said he could definitely buy it. But after a while, he spent five hundred gold and bought back a pile of dead horse bones. The man who asked for a thousand-mile horse was furious. The friend who helped him buy the horse bones said that the five hundred gold was not in vain. If even the bones of the Chollima were so valued and cherished, and he was willing to spend five hundred gold, why worry about not having the Chollima? Sure enough, not long after, many people who had horses came to the man.
After shouting from a distance for several years, people did not believe that anyone was really willing to pay thousands of gold for Chollima. However, this friend changed everyone's inference with one action. This is a game.
We borrowed the allusion of buying horse bones for a thousand gold, think about the question we asked at the beginning, how can we make others understand and believe in us? The key is to send a sincere enough signal to the other party. What is sincerity? Sincerity is not just talking in vain, but paying a real price.
This is like a big brand like Coca-Cola, which is so well-known, why do they still spend so much money on advertising every year? Isn’t this a waste? Of course not, this is to send a signal to consumers, "We are still very powerful, and we will continue to do business for a long time."
To give another more costly example, Jing Ke assassinated Qin. In order to win the trust of King Qin, Prince Dan of Yan first wanted to borrow Fan Yuqi's head.
If you look through the assassin biographies in Sima Qian's "Historical Records", you will find that each of these assassins paid a heavier price than the last in order to win the trust of the target of their assassination.
The second question is just the opposite: What should we do when we want to know other people’s real information but they are unwilling to tell us?
Give me an example. The medical insurance industry faces such a fundamental dilemma: healthy people may not want to buy insurance; only people who are weak or already sick are willing to buy insurance, and have great incentives to hide their unhealthy conditions.
If this develops, the insurance company will definitely have to pay a lot of claims, and it will have to increase the rates of medical insurance. As a result, healthy people are even less likely to buy insurance. This is a vicious cycle.
How can insurance companies break out of this situation and design new rules?
Smart insurance companies do this. It divides health insurance plans into two categories. The first option is that the premiums that policyholders need to pay are low, and the total insured amount they can get is also low, but the reimbursement amount is relatively large every time they see a doctor; the second type is that the premiums are high, the total insured amount is high, but every time they see a doctor, The amount of reimbursement is relatively small.
In this way, people who are relatively healthy can easily choose option one. Because you are in good health anyway, it is a small chance to go to the hospital. If you get sick, just report it.
People who are in poor health often go to the hospital. Although the reimbursement is a little less each time, the total reimbursement amount is very large, so they definitely want a larger total insured amount.
Under such game rules, sick people will definitely not pretend to be healthy people, because there is no need to pay the price of a small total insured amount. Accordingly, insurance companies also obtain the most authentic information about the health status of policyholders. Everyone is happy.
This is a method of using game thinking to successfully identify the authenticity of the other party's information.
From this point of view, what should we do to understand the other party’s true situation to the greatest extent? The key is to design reasonable interaction rules so that the other party pays an appropriate and sufficient cost. The cost is neither more nor less. It is best if the "bad guy" would rather admit that he is a "bad guy" than pay the price of pretending to be a "good guy".
Why do I emphasize to you that you must have game thinking when designing rules?
We all know the word, prisoner’s dilemma. In other words, both parties in the game made rational choices for themselves, but got a lose-lose ending. And good rule design will help us break through the "prisoner's dilemma" and make all parties win.
The system of game theory is huge. Today I will serve one of the side dishes, starting from how game theory can help us "understand". I hope you feel the charm of game theory.
Modern game theory was born after World War II and is a very new knowledge. But what I want to tell you is that humans have had games since ancient times.
Modern game theory is the summary and abstraction of real game phenomena throughout the ages. This is like a thinking model. Some problem-solving techniques may be thought of by a genius in a flash of inspiration. However, if you cannot form a theory, it will be difficult for you to see the essence of it, and it will be difficult to establish your own formal way of thinking and draw inferences from one example. .
When I was studying for a PhD at Peking University, I was very interested in game theory. Later, he taught at Beihang University and also taught game theory courses. You may also know that game theory is difficult and the system is large. I teach game theory at Beihang University for a whole semester. But now, I am here to lead a game theory training class, just because I want to use the live broadcast of four classes to deliver the essence of game theory to you in the most understandable way.
Concretely, what would I say?
In the first lecture, I will take you through the underlying logic and core framework of game theory. Understand in depth what we said before, game thinking is not wishful thinking, but "thinking from someone else's perspective" and "empathizing with others."
In the second and third lectures, I will help you learn and apply game theory more vividly. When we participate in competition and cooperation in real society, the key is to analyze information. You may think that we don’t know ten thousand things, but in fact, there are only two types of things we don’t know: one is not knowing who the other party is; , I don’t know what the other party did.
In the second lecture, I will show you how to use game theory to identify people, their abilities, their character, and whether they are sincere. In the third lecture, we will solve the problem of success. In other words, how to motivate the other party to achieve success together? In the language of game theory, this is the "principal-agent" problem. For example, after studying this lecture, you will know that many parents want their children to study hard, accompany their children to do homework, and go to training classes together. However, in fact, this consumes the parents' time and energy and is of no use. We will answer in this lecture how we can design rules to help us accomplish things when the other party's efforts are unobservable.
Lecture 4, as the last lecture of the training class, we discuss a comprehensive and relatively grand topic in game theory, "Contract Theory." What is the relationship between power and dominance in a society or an enterprise? Where are the boundaries of power? This is to understand and apply game theory from a social perspective.
I hope that through these four trainings, you will have a qualitative leap in your understanding of game theory. When you look at things in the future, you can not only see the things themselves, but also the game structure behind them at a glance. The way you look at the world will be different from now on.
Our game theory training class lasts for one month. But in fact, we will study "game" throughout our lives. Life is an infinite game, and a good game is not about winning or losing a game, but about letting the game continue. I hope we can continue to discuss this in the training class if we have the opportunity.