Page | 1 GAME THEORY IN CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE Ben Cooper Abstract: Game Theory has had an enormous impact on the social sciences, and economics in particular. A Christian user of Game Theory should be at least as aware as any other user of its assumptions and limitations. In particular, he or she should be wary of the ethical stance taken in most practical applications of Game Theory, which is almost uniformly consequentialist, and most often utilitarian. However, so long as these limitations are understood, there is no objection in principle to the tools and concepts of Game Theory being used from a Christian point of view. They may even be used for explicitly Christian social or economic analysis, and this paper will conclude with some examples of how this might be done. Game Theory is a set of tools used in a number of academic fields – including economics, sociology, politics and philosophy – to study processes of human interaction. The name “Game Theory” is perhaps not especially helpful. Robert Aumann suggests “Interactive Decision Theory” as an alternative, which would certainly be more descriptive. 1 After all, this is a discipline which considers the behavior of decision-makers in interactive situations, focussing on cases where there is more than one decision-maker, where the outcome depends upon the combination of decisions, and where each decision involves considering what the other decision-makers will choose. “Interactive Decision Theory” describes it well, but it is probably too late to change things now. So “Game Theory” it will have to be. Game Theory began as a distinct discipline with the work of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern (1947), and the publication of an almost impenetrable book on applied mathematics