Avinash K. Dixit > Quotes

“Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.' In other words, love is a dominant strategy.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday Life

“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 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

“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 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

“Khrushchev first denounced Stalin's purges at the Soviet Communist Party's 20th Congress. After his dramatic speech, someone in the audience shouted out, asking what Khrushchev had been doing at the time. Khrushchev responded by asking the questioner to please stand up and identify himself. The audience remained silent. Khrushchev replied: "That is what I did, too.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday 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

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

“Finding dominant strategies is considerably easier than finding the Holy Grail. (...) It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. In other words, love is a dominant strategy.”
― Avinash K. Dixit Barry J. Nalebuff, Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“If you have just two alternative strategies, and one of them is dominated, then the other must be dominant.”
― Avinash Dixit, Thinking Strategically

“Thus microeconomics of the financial sector—bad incentives and externalities—was the root cause of the macroeconomic effects—loss of output and high unemployment.”
― Avinash Dixit, Microeconomics: A Very Short Introduction

“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

“A similar story can be told about evicting tenants from rent-controlled apartments. If someone buys such a building in New York, he has the right to evict one tenant so as to be able to live in his own building. But this translates into a power to clear the whole. A new landlord can try the following argument with the tenant in Apartment 1A: “I have the right to live in my building. Therefore, I plan to evict you and move into your apartment. However, if you cooperate and leave voluntarily, then I will reward you with $5,000.” This is a token amount in relation to the value of the rent-controlled apartment (although it still buys a few subway tokens in New York). Faced with the choice of eviction with $5,000 or eviction without $5,000, the tenant takes the money and runs. The landlord then offers the same deal to the tenant in 1B, and so on.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, Thinking Strategically

“The dummies and slackers, by their mere existence, are imposing a negative externality on the skilled and dedicated,”
― Avinash Dixit, Microeconomics: A Very Short Introduction

“Politicians, advertisers, and children are all players in their own strategic games with their own interests and incentives.”
― 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

“verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“while I hope the subject is fascinating and my treatment readable, such a book cannot be a page-turner.”
― Avinash Dixit, Microeconomics: A Very Short Introduction