Thinking Strategically 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

“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

“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

“A stock forecaster whose advice is always dead wrong is as good a predictor as one who is always right.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, Thinking Strategically

“The possibility of misperceptions means that you have to be more forgiving, but not forgetting, than simple tit-for-tat.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, Thinking Strategically

“Rule 2: If you have a dominant strategy, use it. Do not be concerned about your rival’s choice. If you do not have a dominant strategy, but your rival does, then anticipate that he will use it, and choose your best response accordingly.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, Thinking Strategically

“The dominance in “dominant strategy” is a dominance of one of your strategies over your other strategies, not of you over your opponent. A dominant strategy is one that makes a player better off than he would be if he used any other strategy, no matter what strategy his opponent uses.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, Thinking Strategically

“if you have to take some risks, it is often better to do this as quickly as possible.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, Thinking Strategically

“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

“Taken at face value it would suggest that whether or not a country will be attacked depends on whether there are an even or an odd number of links in the chain of potential predators.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, Thinking Strategically

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