Thinking about the new economy, we've realized that there's a special connection here. The connection is with one of the great intellectual figures of this century, John von Neumann. Together with economist Oskar Morgenstern, von Neumann was also the inventor of game theory. Von Neumann's and Morgenstern's game theory provides a model of the pie, and how it gets divided up. We rely on these insights throughout Co opetition .
Game theory is a different way of looking at the world.
Conventional economics takes the structure of markets as fixed. People are thought of as simple stimulus-response machines. Sellers and buyers assume that products and prices are fixed, and they optimize production and consumption accordingly. Conventional economics has its place in describing the operation of established, mature markets, but it doesn't capture people's creativity in finding new ways of interacting with one another. In game theory, nothing is fixed.