basically the title I’ve always wondered how it is economics
In: Economics
It’s a mathematical theory (i.e. an area of maths) that describes situations in which you have a set of players who choose from a set of strategies and receive payoffs based on their strategies and those of the other players. It’s pretty broad: you can study games in which two players each choose between two strategies or games in which infinite sets of players choose from infinite sets of strategies. You can study zero-sum games in which any gain for one player necessarily means a loss for another player, or you can study games in which players can find win-win (or lose-lose) outcomes. You can study a situation in which intelligent players play a single game and want to ensure they will get the least-worst payoff even if everyone else picks the decisions that will hurt them the most (this is what leads to ideas like the Nash equilibrium). Or you can study a situation in which players repeatedly play each other and can learn from each other or punish each other for choices they have made in past games. Or you can study a situation in which players can cooperate and plan their strategies together.
I certainly wouldn’t say that “it is economics”, but it has applications in various areas of economics, and the early work in the field was mostly inspired by economics. Large swathes of economics are about situations in which people (or businesses) choose strategies to try and make the biggest profits, with the profits depending on their own strategies and those chosen by others.
It also has applications in evolutionary biology, sociology, psychology, computer science, political science, military theory, philosophy, etc., not to mention in actual games. Lots of people from different fields are interested in the idea of making strategic choices, or at least ideas that are closely analogous. In evolutionary biology, the “strategies” are evolutionary traits and the “payoff” is evolutionary fitness, i.e. the likelihood of surviving and reproducing. In psychology, you might be interested in studying how real humans make strategic decisions. In philosophy, you might be interested in views about how people *should* make strategic decisions. In computer science, you might want to study how different nodes in a network can make decisions to ensure a positive outcome for the network as a whole.
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