Peace Through Rational Collaboration: How game theory and AI can help societies escape destructive competition
- Feb 4
- 3 min read
In an era defined by complex, multi-stakeholder conflicts — from corporate strategy to international diplomacy — traditional decision-making approaches often fall short. What if there were a systematic way to unlock collaboration, even when incentives seem to push parties toward competition?
By combining insights from game theory with modern AI-enabled negotiation systems, we can shift from win-lose assumptions to solutions that make collaboration the most rational choice.
Why Collaboration Beats Competition
Game theory doesn’t just model conflict — it reveals its hidden structure, a principle vividly demonstrated by Derek Muller of Veritasium through his exploration of game theory, particularly the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Muller shows how individually rational decisions can lead to collectively poor outcomes. Yet those same models also point to a deeper truth: when parties can credibly commit to cooperative strategies, everyone benefits more.
What Game Theory Reveals About Life, The Universe, and Everything
The insight illustrated in this video — that collaboration yields better outcomes than competition — isn’t new. What’s new is our ability to design systems that enable that collaboration in complex, multi-party settings.
In the video, Muller highlights a significant historical example of global diplomacy to illustrate this actually working in practice. The example (nuclear arms reduction treaty between Gorbachev and Reagan) matters because it shows that even in high-stakes competitive environments, cooperation can emerge when commitments are structured credibly. But against today’s backdrop — including the Doomsday Clock’s dire warning — it’s clear that such cooperation is not reliably repeatable.
From Theory to Practice: Embedding Collaboration in Decision Systems
Foundational game theorists like John Nash showed how strategic choices shape outcomes — and why rational actors can become stuck in bad equilibria. What he did not provide was a practical method for helping real people escape those equilibria together. Modern approaches bridge that gap.
Building on Nash’s insight, further work proposed a different strategy — Maximize the Minimum Gain (MMG) — aimed at helping parties move together toward outcomes where even the worst-off participant benefits. Harvard Professor Emeritus Howard Raiffa supported this view for its simplicity and superior outcomes (1). However, subsequent research (2) as well as attempts at practical implementation of this theory still highlighted a crucial gap—the need for a mechanism to enable collaboration.
The culmination of decades of further research and development, Smartsettle Infinity now integrates sophisticated algorithms that model complex negotiation problems across many parties and issues:
enabling parties to express preferences over packages of outcomes rather than isolated positions
evaluating those preferences confidentially, without pressure or signaling
revealing a baseline consensus when all parties independently accept a package
harvesting additional value beyond the baseline, ensuring no party is left worse off
This isn’t abstract theory — it’s a practical mechanism that embeds collaboration into the negotiation process itself.
Real-World Impact: Case Studies in Collective Problem-Solving
Smartsettle Infinity has been applied in simulated settings based on high-stakes, real-world conflicts — including Myanmar, Gaza, Ukraine, Kashmir, and most recently, climate change. These simulated case studies demonstrate not only that collaboration is possible in complex geopolitical contexts, but that structured, algorithm-assisted negotiation can reveal pathways to agreement that weren’t visible before.
Reframing Conflict for a Collaborative Future
Conflict isn’t just a barrier — it’s a signal that interdependent decisions are being made without shared information or aligned incentives. What game theory and AI show us is that rational agents don’t have to default to competition. When structures allow parties to explore each other’s interests safely, collaboration often becomes the most logical outcome. Technology does not replace human judgment — it equips people to reach better outcomes together.
The work of negotiation leaders, civic technologists, and mediators today is to embed these insights into how we resolve disputes, design systems, and govern collective choices — at scale. When rational collaboration becomes the foundation — not the exception — we unlock better outcomes for everyone.
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Selected References
(1) 1996, Howard Raiffa, Lectures on Negotiation Analysis. Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.
(2) 1999, Shell, G. Richard, Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People. New York: Penguin, 1999. ISBN 0 14 02.8191 6 paper.
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