Long-Term Competition — A Game-Theoretic Analysis

There have been continuing expressions of interest from a variety of quarters in the development of techniques for modelling national behavior in a long-term context of continuing international rivalry — for short, “long term competition”. The most characteristic feature of these models is that they extend over time in a fairly regular or repetitive manner. The underlying structure of possible actions and consequences remains the same, though parameters may vary and balances shift, and the decisions and policies of the national decision makers are by no means constrained to be constant or smoothly-varying, or even “rational” in any precisely identifiable sense. The use of game theory or an extension thereof is…