When is it better not to be No 1? Whether it's in sports, academia or business, we are conditioned to believe that success means being first. We make decisions and adopt strategies geared towards putting us in a dominant position.
But there are contests where it may not be possible or even desirable to arrive at a dominant position - in the competition among companies for market share and resources, for example, or in the arms race among countries. A company's overly dominant market share invites anti-monopoly lawsuits, as Microsoft learned to its cost. Countries trying to dominate their region escalate tensions and instability, as with current disputes over the South China Sea discussed by the foreign ministers of China, the US and Southeast Asian countries in Cambodia last week.
Far better for all concerned (and for world peace) is to arrive at a situation where no player is inclined to make unilateral decisions that would change the status quo, knowing the set of decisions that other players could make. Enter game theory. Pioneered by the Hungarian-American polymath John von Neumann in the 1940s, game theory is the mathematics of how players decide strategies in different situations in the face of competing strategies acted out by other players. It is essentially a methodology to understand conflict and co-operation.
Posing questions in the context of a simplified model reveals the essential features of a conflict, shorn of its confusing real-life complications. In its simplest form, game theory assumes that players make rational decisions to maximise their benefits, possess all the available information and are fully aware of the decisions that can be made by other players.
Let's apply an elementary version of game theory to the conflicting territorial claims in our region.
China and Japan claim sovereignty over the Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea. China and Vietnam claim sovereignty over the Spratly and Paracel islands in the South China Sea. Each country has offered few conciliatory gestures while taking action seen as provocative by the other.