the.com/nash equilibrium
where everyone's stuck doing their second-best, because switching alone only makes it worse.
means a set of strategies where no player can improve their own outcome by changing course while everyone else stays put.
from named for john nash, who proved in his 1950 princeton thesis that such stable points exist in virtually any competitive game, a result that later won him the nobel and inspired a movie about the math genius who saw them everywhere.
not optimalcan trap everyone in a worse outcome than cooperation
prisoner's dilemmaclassic example, both confess even though silence beats it
multiple equilibriasome games have many, or even none in pure strategies
nash's proofused topology, not economics, to guarantee existence