ABSTRACT
Despite game theory’s many brilliant insights, its ambition to underpin some unified social science has not been fulfilled. There are two problems that we have come across in this book. The first is indeterminacy, which even after the best efforts of superb minds still remains. Two rather different tacks have been examined to combat this problem but neither breaks with the instrumental model. Either it has been taken to even dizzier heights, as in the Refinement Project (recall Chapter 3), or it has been ‘dumbed down’, as with the evolutionary approach. Yet the second problem, which comes from the experimental evidence, concerns the failure of this model to predict action in games that, from a strategic point of view, are quite simple (e.g. the Prisoner’s Dilemma game and dictator or ultimatum game). The trouble seems to be that people are motivated by conditional kinds of moral motivation (see Chapters 3, 4 and 5). In this chapter, we look at some of the theories of rational action that have been developed in a game theoretical context to try to account for this kind of motivation.
