Game Theory

Real agents are boundedly rational, incompletely informed, emotionally reactive, and embedded in networks of trust and reputation that game theory can model but rarely does at sufficient granularity. The map is not the territory.

The emerging field of moral psychology suggests that these departures from idealized rationality are not noise but signal: emotions like guilt and shame are commitment devices that solve coordination problems that pure rationality cannot. Game theory that ignores moral cognition is modeling agents that do not exist.