The Art of Strategy Quotes

“It may not be enough to play a game well—you must also be sure you are playing the right game.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“The nouveau riche flaunt their wealth, but the old rich scorn such gauche displays. Minor officials prove their status with petty displays of authority, while the truly powerful show their strength through gestures of magnanimity. People of average education show off the studied regularity of their script, but the well educated often scribble illegibly. Mediocre students answer a teacher’s easy questions, but the best students are embarrassed to prove their knowledge of trivial points. Acquaintances show their good intentions by politely ignoring one’s flaws, while close friends show intimacy by teasingly highlighting them. People of moderate ability seek formal credentials to impress employers and society, but the talented often downplay their credentials even if they have bothered to obtain them. A person of average reputation defensively refutes accusations against his character, while a highly respected person finds it demeaning to dignify accusations with a response.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“The key lesson of game theory is to put yourself in the other player’s shoes.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“You might think that having more options is always a good thing. But thinking strategically, you can often do better by cutting off options.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“A Nash equilibrium is a combination of two conditions: i. Each player is choosing a best response to what he believes the other players will do in the game. ii. Each player’s beliefs are correct. The other players are doing just what everyone else thinks they are doing.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“RULE 1: Look forward and reason backward.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“The wisdom of taking risks early applies to most aspects of life, whether it be career choices, investments, or dating.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“Your opponent can observe and exploit any systematic pattern almost as easily as he can exploit an unchanging repetition of a single strategy. It is unpredictability that is important when mixing.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“Axelrod argues that tit for tat embodies four principles that should be present in any effective strategy for the repeated prisoners’ dilemma: clarity, niceness, provocability, and forgivingness.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“Because threats and promises indicate that you will act against your own interest, their credibility becomes the key issue. After”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“Steven Brams and Peter Fishburn, one a political scientist and the other an economist, argue that “approval voting” allows voters to express their true preferences without concern for electability.8 Under approval voting, each voter may vote for as many candidates as he wishes.”
― Avinash Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“An easy way to check whether randomness is needed is to ask whether there is any harm in letting the other player find out your actual choice before he responds. When this would be disadvantageous to you, there is advantage in randomness that keeps the other guessing.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“When you find yourself playing a strategic game, you must determine whether the interaction is simultaneous or sequential.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“That brings us to one last point. You may be thinking you are playing one game, but it is only part of a larger game. There is always a larger game.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“The only logically valid deduction in such situations is that if you follow any system or pattern in your choices, it will be exploited by the other player to his advantage and to your disadvantage; therefore you should not follow any such system or pattern. If you are known to be a left-side kicker, goalies will cover that side better and save your kicks more often. You have to keep them guessing by being unsystematic, or random, on any single occasion. Deliberately choosing your actions at random may seem irrational in something that purports to be rational strategic thinking, but there is method in this apparent madness. The value of randomization can be quantified, not merely understood in a vague general sense. In this chapter we will explicate this method.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“if you have to take some risks, it is often better to do so as quickly as possible.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“Actions speak louder than words.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“The theorem states that in zero-sum games in which the players’ interests are strictly opposed (one’s gain is the other’s loss), one player should attempt to minimize his opponent’s maximum payoff while his opponent attempts to maximize his own minimum payoff. When they do so, the surprising conclusion is that the minimum of the maximum (minimax) payoffs equals the maximum of the minimum (maximin) payoffs. The general proof of the minimax theorem is quite complicated, but the result is useful and worth remembering. If all you want to know is the gain of one player or the loss of the other when both play their best mixes, you need only compute the best mix for one of them and determine its result.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“If you choose a definite course of action, and the enemy discovers what you are going to do, he will adapt his course of action to your maximum disadvantage. You want to surprise the enemy; the surest way to do so is to surprise yourself. You should keep your options open as long as possible, and at the last moment choose between them by an unpredictable and, therefore, espionage-proof device.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“When playing mixed or random strategies, you can’t fool the opposition every time. The best you can hope for is to keep them guessing and fool them some of the time.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“You should make game theory your friend, and not a bugbear, in your strategic thinking.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“The name given by game theorists for this property is dominant strategy. A player is said to have a dominant strategy if that same strategy is better for him than all of his other available strategies no matter what strategy or strategy combination the other player or players choose.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“We have since come to the full realization of the important part that cooperation plays in strategic situations, and how good strategy must appropriately mix competition and cooperation.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“Strategic moves, therefore, contain two elements: the planned course of action and the associated actions that make this course credible. We will try to give you a better appreciation of both aspects by making two passes through the ideas.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“What should you take away from this account of chess? It shows the method for thinking about any highly complex games you may face. You should combine the rule of look ahead and reason back with your experience, which guides you in evaluating the intermediate positions reached at the end of your span of forward calculation. Success will come from such synthesis of the science of game theory and the art of playing a specific game, not from either alone.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“Businessmen and corporations must develop good competitive strategies to survive, and find cooperative opportunities to grow the pie.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“Strategic thinking is the art of outdoing an adversary, knowing that the adversary is trying to do the same to you.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“Countersignaling You would think, based on the previous section, that if you have the ability to signal your type, you should. That way, you differentiate yourself from those who can’t make the same signal. And yet, some of the people most able to signal refrain from doing so. As Feltovich, Harbaugh, and To explain: The nouveau riche flaunt their wealth, but the old rich scorn such gauche displays. Minor officials prove their status with petty displays of authority, while the truly powerful show their strength through gestures of magnanimity. People of average education show off the studied regularity of their script, but the well educated often scribble illegibly. Mediocre students answer a teacher’s easy questions, but the best students are embarrassed to prove their knowledge of trivial points. Acquaintances show their good intentions by politely ignoring one’s flaws, while close friends show intimacy by teasingly highlighting them. People of moderate ability seek formal credentials to impress employers and society, but the talented often downplay their credentials even if they have bothered to obtain them. A person of average reputation defensively refutes accusations against his character, while a highly respected person finds it demeaning to dignify accusations with a response.6 Their insight is that in some circumstances, the best way to signal your ability or type is by not signaling at all, by refusing to play the signaling game.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“Keynes used the beauty contest as a metaphor for the stock market, where each investor wants to buy the stocks that will rise in price, which means the stocks that investors, in general, think will appreciate.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“Near the end of Joseph Heller’s celebrated novel Catch-22, the Second World War is almost won. Yossarian does not want to be among the last to die; it won’t make any difference to the outcome. He explains this to Major Danby, his superior officer. When Danby asks, “But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way?” Yossarian replies, “Then I’d certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?”2”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life