Saturday, August 9, 2008



Process Mash Up
– Game Theory and TOC





As I was reading Game Theory and specifically the prisoner’s
dilemma I was amazed to see the correlation between it and the thoughts
proposed by Goldratt.

Combining both of them it seems to answer more clearly why a
company will necessary perform much below the sum of the capabilities of the
employees.


Let me first get into my understanding of the Prisoners
dilemma.



So each of the players are interested only
in their personal gain in any scenario as that maximises their return.

Now if we apply this to the standard way bonuses or any
incentives are determined in an organisation we get a beautiful view to the
Local-Global optima problem




Hence it seems that every employee will necessarily put his
interest over the company’s which will result in everybody gunning for local
optima.


While this deduction may seem obvious in TOC, putting it in
the context of the Prisoner’s dilemma helps us to always garner all the
knowledge of Game theory to solve this conundrum

On a side note it seems you can apply the Prisoner’s dilemma
to marriage and realize why marriages are doomed to fail