Game Theory for the Maritime Professional

Whether engaged in design, construction, maintenance or operations activities, Naval Architects and Marine Engineers are continually engaged in negotiation and decision making. However, very little formal negotiation and decision-making training exists for NAMEs, despite the fact that in recent decades there have been significant developments in the game theory field. These developments in game theory have resulted in a standardized terminology and provide theoretical and mathematical concepts that, when adopted in the maritime community, could provide significant advantages to the initiated professional. This paper provides introductions to game theory concepts that have immediate application to typical activities that NAMEs are engaged in on a day-to-day basis. Application of these concepts can result in better and more rapid decision making and assists in the disentanglement of technical and operational problems when they occur. Understanding of these concepts can be as vital as oral and written communication skills for engineers to be able to successfully achieve their technical objectives for the client’s and the public’s best interests. This paper presents these concepts at an introductory level and provides several maritime examples, but also provides a substantial amount of references and a bibliography to allow further study on the subject. Game theory concepts discussed in this paper include the Prisoner’s Dilemma, Tit for Tat, the Nash equilibrium, BATNA, Pareto optimality, and the OODA loop.