Arthur Weiss is the managing partner of AWARE, specialising in competitive intelligence research, analysis and training. He has written and lectured widely on a variety of CI topics, including a column (Ask Arthur) in SCIP's Competitive Intelligence magazine.  Arthur's background in CI goes back to the 1980s where he worked as the Marketing Intelligence manager for D&B Europe. Arthur's MBA thesis used game theory as a way of examining competitor rivalry, and he has continued his interest in this underused tool for analysing and anticipating competitor actions - including an analysis of CI ethics, published in the SCIP publication, 'Navigating the Gray Zone'. 

Game Theory - A Tool to Anticipate Competitor Actions!

'Business is a game,' proclaimed IBM founder Thomas J. Watson. It is 'The greatest game in the world if you know how to play it'.  Game Theory is an analysis technique that helps business analysts understand the rules of the game and how to play it.  The technique looks at strategic situations where players choose different actions in an attempt to maximize their returns. It is ideally situated to looking at competitive strategies available to organizations - and has been used to select the best strategies in a number of commercial conflicts. The concepts behind game theory are ancient; its use as an analysis approach, is new. The importance is of this approach is growing - with the 1994 and 2005 Nobel prizes for economics both going to game theoreticians - one of whom, John Nash, was the subject of the film, 'A Beautiful Mind'. Game theory differs from the similarly named techniques of war-gaming and strategic gaming because the amount of information required is considerably less. This makes the technique particularly useful where information is incomplete - typical for most competitive intelligence situations. This session will outline what game theory is - giving a brief background of the subject and its development, with an emphasis on its use in understanding competitor rivalry.

Presentation Goals

• Understand the background to Game theory, and how it has developed as a tool for understanding competitor rivalry 
• Discover how to use decision trees, payoff matrices and PARTS analysis to analyse business situations 
• Learn how game theory can be used to anticipate competitor reactions