...management relies. bet you that the technologies we now think are so whiz-bang will sound awfully quaint. But what will certainly be the legacy of this time is the sweeping effect of consolidation of the marketplace

I'm probably the last person in America to have seen the Academy Award winning film "A Beautiful Mind," but just saw it last night. In a strangely dreamlike sequence, it dramatizes the moment that Nobel Prize winning John Nash arrives at his famous theory of market equilibrium a sweeping new view which has since been applied to explain everything from trade negotiations to evolutionary selection to game theory.

Nash studied interactive decision making, where the outcome for each participant or "player" depends on the actions of all If you are a player in such a game when choosing your course of action or "strategy" you must take into account the choices of others. But in thinking about their choices you must recognize that they are thinking about yours, and in turn trying to take into account your thinking about their thinking, and so on.

The way it's illustrated in the film is this Five women walk into a bar in Princeton four pretty brunettes and one magnificent blonde. Naturally, all the men focused on the blonde.

Nash realized that was a mistake. Adam Smith, the father of the common capitalistic economic theory of the time, would have predicted--and encouraged--the pursuit by all parties for the blonde. It's the satisfaction of self-interest that drives...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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