This year's Nobel prize for economics might almost have doubled as the prize for peace. On October 10th, three days after the International Atomic Energy Agency and its director-general, Mohamed ElBaradei, won their laurels for monitoring the misuse of nuclear power, the economics prize was bestowed on two scholars whose best work was also done in the shadow of the mushroom cloud. Robert Aumann, of Hebrew University, and Thomas Schel-ling, of the University of Maryland, are both game theorists. Game theory is now part of every economist's toolkit and has been recognised by the Nobel award before, when John Harsa-nyi, John Nash and Reinhard Selten shared the honour in 1994. It is the study of what happens when the calculating, self-interested protagonist of economic fable meets another member of his kind. In such encounters, neither party can decide what to do without taking into account the actions of the other.
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