 How damaging is zero-sum thinking to an agent's interests when the world is positive-sum?Shaun Hargreaves Heap and Mehmet Mars Seven Abstract: We study whether zero-sum decision rules, maximin and minimax, harm agents' interests in positive-sum strategic environments relative to Nash equilibrium behavior or, more generally, than best response behaviour. Contrary to an influential evolutionary view, we give illustrations where maximin serves an agent's interests better than Nash equilibrium behaviour. We also show that these illustration are not atypical or idiosyncratic because, in our main result, the class of such games where a maximin profile strictly Pareto dominates all Nash equilibria has the same cardinality as the class of games in which a Nash equilibrium strictly Pareto dominates all maximin profiles. Thus, neither behavior is generally superior. We further identify additional mechanisms favoring maximin over Nash equilibrium, including coordination failures under multiple equilibria, where maximin can outperform Nash play in realised-pay-off terms. A systematic analysis of strictly ordinal symmetric 3x3 games shows that these effects arise with non-trivial frequency. Our findings, therefore, suggest that the observed rise in zero-sum thinking in many rich countries, when associated with a maximin decision rule, will not be readily displaced through its generation of inferior pay-offs. Date: 2026-04 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2604.19359 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Papers from arXiv.org |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.