Game-Theoretic Strategy & Equilibrium

Primes that model strategic interaction among self-interested agents: equilibrium concepts (Nash equilibrium, evolutionarily stable strategy, mixed strategy), payoff structures that shape cooperation or rivalry (zero-sum, non-zero-sum, social dilemma, strategic complementarity), and coordination or matching problems (coordination games, two-sided matching, winner-take-all markets).

20 primes in this family — primes that sit near one another in abstraction space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Anti-Coordination Game — Each player's payoff is higher when its action differs from the others', so the best-response correspondence is anti-aligned, pure equilibria are asymmetric, and the hard problem becomes who plays which role — the formal dual of a coordination game.
• Competition — Rivalrous pursuit of a scarce prize where one party's gain is another's loss.
• Coordination Problem and Equilibrium Selection — Multiple stable equilibria require alignment on single outcome.
• Evolutionarily Stable Strategy — A population strategy is stable if, once dominant, no rare mutant can invade — equilibrium defined by what survives perturbation, not by ex-ante agreement.
• Game-Theoretic Strategy — Strategic interaction analysis.
• Incentive Compatibility — Align incentives.
• Keynesian Beauty Contest — The rational choice is not what you most prefer, nor what you think others prefer, but what you think others believe others will choose.
• Minimax Strategy — Choose the action whose worst possible outcome is the best worst possible outcome — minimize the maximum loss an adversarial environment can inflict.
• Mixed Strategy — Randomize over actions so an adversary cannot predict the next choice.
• Nash Equilibrium — A strategy profile in which no agent can improve its payoff by unilaterally changing strategy, given the others' choices — the fixed point of the joint best-response correspondence.
• Non-Zero-Sum Game — A strategic interaction whose joint payoff is not fixed: cooperative play can create value and destructive play can destroy it, so the size of the pie is endogenous to the strategy profile.
• Price Mechanism — Supply-demand pricing.
• Price of Anarchy — The worst-case ratio between the aggregate cost of selfish equilibrium play and the cost under centralized optimal coordination.
• Rock-Paper-Scissors (Intransitive Cyclic Dominance) — A beats-relation that closes into a cycle rather than a ranking, so no option dominates and the system is governed by rotation and coexistence.
• Social Dilemma — Individually rational defection yields a collectively worse outcome (canonical form: the Prisoner's Dilemma).
• Strategic Complementarity — One actor's action raises the marginal benefit of others taking the same action.
• Strategic Substitute — One actor's action lowers the marginal benefit of others taking the same action.
• Two-Sided Matching — Forming stable pairings between two sides of a market under each side's preferences.
• Winner Take All Market — A payoff structure convex in rank concentrates most reward at the top, so small skill gaps produce vast reward gaps.
• Zero Sum Game — The total payoff across participants is fixed, so one party's gain is necessarily another's equal loss and the only strategic question is distribution.