Dangerous Men and Game Theory

[flamingsword]

Because women are so rarely a threat to men, heterosexual men are used to treating the women they are flirting with or dating as though they are in a cooperative game where the players trust each other, and the objective of cooperative games is to achieve fairness. This is why men complain that when women treat them as though they could be dangerous, the most common complaint is that women are being unfair, i.e. breaking the cooperative game.

In the dating game, men have a Shapley value; women have a Nash Equilibrium.

Because some men have bad intentions and most men have the physical strength and social capital to abuse women, women cannot deal with men the way men deal with women. Women's Nash equilibrium has to be to treat all men as dangerous. This introduces a lot of inefficiencies into the dating game, which men blame on women seeking safety, rather than blaming on other men.

This is at the heart of the Not All Men/Yes All Women debate.