Games

You send a message. No response. You wait a day and send another. Still nothing. You send a third, then a fourth. By the time you stop, you've said everything there was to say to someone who had already decided not to respond.

From the outside, this is obviously the wrong move. From inside it, it felt like the only option.

Game theory explains that gap. Each situation has a structure. Players, moves, payoffs. Some moves make your position worse no matter what the other person does. Those are dominated strategies. When you can see the structure, you can see which moves they are.

Every chapter in this book lays out a game from modern dating and names the dominated strategies.