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The Nobel prize for economics was awarded yesterday to Thomas Schelling and Robert Aumann for their individual contributions to the understanding of conflict and co-operation.
Both were pioneers in “game theory”, a branch of economics that now dominates the subject and is extremely important in other disciplines such as political theory, sociology and even biology. They will share the $1.3m (£740,000, �1m) prize. Born in 1921, Mr Schelling, a professor at the University of Maryland, developed a theory of conflict situations that strongly influenced US attitudes towards nuclear deterrence in the cold war period of the 1950s and 1960s.
His 1960 book, The Strategy of Conflict, highlighted the importance of precommitment, brinkmanship and credible threats as strategic weapons in a tense stand-off between two parties. By limiting your own options, for example, you can make it clear to opponents how you will respond to their actions, whatever they do, thereby increasing the chances the other side will back down. Credible threats could also be made with brinkmanship, gradually increasing the probability of a conflict, Mr Schelling observed, adding that children understood brinkmanship perfectly.
Applied to the nuclear arms race, the theories gave the US its strategies to deal with the fundamental problem of how to get some use from weapons so terrible that their use could not really be contemplated.
Outside the geo-political sphere, Mr Schelling also found that people tended to co-operate more readily than a group of them behaving purely rationally would. Mr Aumann's contribution to strategic thinking around the subject of conflict and co-operation came in using logic and mathematics to understand the options available to people when they face the same opponents or competitors day-in, day-out.
When strategic situations are repeated very large numbers of times, even when individuals have immediate conflicts of interest, the opportunity for building co-operation increases because the individuals have to deal with the other side again and again in the future.
The analysis of “repeated games”, which Mr Aumann started, is now a mainstream part of all social sciences and applied to issues as diverse as political conflicts, irrigation systems, international treaties and collusion among companies.
Game theory was also the subject of the Nobel prize for economics sciences in 1994, when it was won by John Harsanyi, John Nash and Reinhard Selten. Paul Klemperer of Nuffield College, Oxford University, said the two economists came from different ends of the discipline, with Mr Schelling brilliantly intuitive and Mr Aumann one of the world's cleverest and most abstract economic thinkers. “It was an extremely natural choice,” he said. “The whole methodology [of game theory] has been so dominant in economics.”
译文:
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诺贝尔经济学奖昨天授予了托马斯•谢林（Thomas Schelling）和罗伯特•奥曼（Robert Aumann），以表彰他们在促进对冲突与合作的理解方面所作的贡献。
他们两位都是“博弈论”（game theory）的先驱。作为经济学的一个分支，博弈论目前在该学科研究中占据主要地位，在政治理论、社会学甚至生物学等其他学科中也极为重要。两位获奖者将分享130万美元的奖金。生于1921年的谢林先生是马里兰大学教授，他曾提出了冲突局势理论，在上世纪50年代和60年代的冷战时期，该理论极大地影响了美国政府对核威慑的态度。
他于60年代出版的著作《冲突的战略》（The Strategy of Conflict），着力阐述了在双方处于僵持时，采取一些战略性手段的重要性。这些手段包括：事先承诺、边缘政策和有威慑力的威胁。例如，通过限定你自己的选择范围，你就可以使对手清楚地知道，你将对他们的行动作出何种反应——不管他们采取什么行动，这也就加大了他们作出让步的可能性。谢林先生发现，有威慑力的威胁也可以与边缘政策配合使用，以逐渐提高发生冲突的机率。他补充说，儿童对边缘政策的理解非常到位。
应用在核军备竞赛方面，上述理论为美国提供了处理一个根本问题的战略，这个问题就是如何发挥那些杀伤力极大武器的作用，由于它们的杀伤力太大，人们并不认为会真的投入使用。
在地缘政治领域之外，谢林先生还发现，人通常都是愿意合作的，但当他们在一个团队中完全依理性行事时，则不那么容易合作。奥曼先生对冲突与合作战略思想的贡献在于，他运用了逻辑学和数学来理解，当人们每天都面对相同对手或竞争者时，他们所能作出的选择。
当战略情形大量重复出现时，即便个体间有直接的利益冲突，达成合作的机率也会上升，因为每个个体在未来时间内，都会与另一方反复打交道。
奥曼率先提出的“重复博弈”分析，目前成为所有社会科学的主流分支，并已应用于政治冲突、灌溉系统、国际条约乃至公司相互勾结等各种各样的问题。
博弈论同时也是1994年诺贝尔经济学奖的获奖学科，该奖授予约翰•哈萨尼(John Harsanyi)、约翰•纳什(John Nash)及莱因哈德•泽尔腾(Reinhard Selten)。牛津大学纳菲尔德学院 (Nuffield College) 教授保罗•克伦佩雷尔(Paul Klemperer)表示，(此次获奖的)两位经济学家分别代表博弈论的不同观点。谢林有着极佳的直觉，而奥曼是经济学最为睿智和最善于抽象思维的学者。“这是再自然不过的选择，”他表示，“(博奕论的)整体方法论已在经济学领域占有极具支配力的地位。”
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