ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to demonstrate the usefulness of the previous chapter’s analysis, despite neoclassicism’s abandonment of this rich vein that, ironically, neoclassicists themselves had unearthed. Just as Chapter 5 demonstrated that the indeterminacy we unveiled in Chapter 4 did not impede useful insights from emerging, similarly here I shall attempt to show that psychological game theory has the capacity to help us understand phenomena that are real, important and hitherto ill-understood because of, rather than despite, the indeterminacy it generates. In short, the contribution of chapters such as Chapter 4 and the present one is to point out that neoclassicism, because of its obsession with ‘closed’ models, has a penchant for jettisoning into the abyss insights that it itself has contributed to social science. Just like a monopolist who is keen to destroy part of the surplus in order to maintain his own monopoly profits, neoclassicism destroys part of its own intellectual surplus so as to keep non-neoclassical theorists at bay.
