Hino 1 Nathan Hino Professor Sherwood ECON 120 18 April 2021 1 King 3 Game Theory Essay 1 Kings 3 is a great example of game theory because it implements “strategic decision making” by the king. (Cowen & Tabarrok, p. 282) The king is presented with a situation in which two prostitutes are fighting over the rights to a child, thus, the king realizes he needs to figure out which is the real mother. Cleverly, the king decides to make a bluff stating that he will “cut the living child in two and give half to one and half to the other.” (1 Kings 3:25, English Standard Version) This is an interesting way to find the real child’s mother because if the false mother had a sense of sympathy, she could have reacted in the same way as the real mother. Yet, the king must have realized that if the false claimer was sinister enough to steal a child, she must not care about the fate of the child. Overall, the king’s bluff worked excellently because the sincerity of the real mother probably would have outshined the false ones despite the outcome. Hino 2 Works Cited Cowen, Tyler, and Alexander Tabarrok. Modern Principles of Economics. 3rd ed., Worth Publishers Inc., U.S., 2014. The English Standard Version Bible. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.
