Game Theory
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50 free Game Theory trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Game theory is the study of decisions whose results depend on what other people decide. It began as a branch of mathematics, reshaped economics, and now turns up in biology, politics, sport and the way markets are built. This quiz covers the ground an introductory course does: the prisoner's dilemma, the stag hunt and other classic games, the ideas of equilibrium and payoffs, the people who founded the field, and the places the theory shows up in real life, from Cold War strategy to television game shows. It is pitched at beginners and curious readers as much as at students revising for a test. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you can play straight through, check what you know before an exam, or print the questions for a class.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Kubrick film, made with advice from game theorist Thomas Schelling, features a Soviet doomsday machine?
Dr. Strangelove
Dr. Strangelove turns on a deterrent nobody was told about. As the title character protests, a doomsday machine only deters an enemy who knows it exists.
Q 02Which Best Picture-winning film stars Russell Crowe as game theory pioneer John Nash?
A Beautiful Mind
A Beautiful Mind won four Academy Awards. In its best-known scene, classmates debating how to approach a group of women at a bar give Nash his breakthrough idea.
Q 03Which game theory model is named after a dare in which two drivers speed head-on until one swerves?
Chicken
Chicken brands whoever swerves first a coward. The philosopher Bertrand Russell compared the nuclear standoff between East and West to the same deadly dare.
Q 04In game theory, how should a rock paper scissors player pick moves so that no opponent can gain an edge?
Uniformly at random
Uniformly at random, with every throw equally likely, leaves an opponent no pattern to exploit. Against anyone more predictable, a player can gain an edge by spotting patterns in past throws.
Q 05In the one-shot prisoner's dilemma, which choice leaves each suspect better off whatever the accomplice decides?
Betraying the partner
Betraying the partner always shortens your own sentence, so it is the dominant strategy. The catch is that when both suspects reason this way, both end up worse off than if they had kept quiet.
Q 06Which pencil-and-paper game is 'solved' in game theory, always ending in a draw when both sides play perfectly?
Tic-tac-toe
Tic-tac-toe is simple enough that best play always draws. In the 1983 film WarGames, nuclear war is likened to the game: with the best strategies on all sides, nobody wins.
Q 07Which phrase, the title of a Garrett Hardin essay, describes self-interested users ruining a shared resource?
Tragedy of the commons
Tragedy of the commons echoes an 1833 pamphlet by William Forster Lloyd, who pictured herders each adding extra cattle to shared grazing land until it was ruined.
Q 08In Thomas Schelling's puzzle, where in New York City did most students say they would meet a stranger?
Grand Central Terminal
Grand Central Terminal at noon was the most frequent reply. Schelling called such a stand-out choice a focal point: with no way to talk, people coordinate on whatever seems obvious.
Q 09Which restaurant habit creates game theory's 'diner's dilemma', tempting every guest to order a pricier dish?
Splitting the bill evenly
Splitting the bill evenly means friends cover most of whatever extra you order. In a 2004 field experiment, diners sharing the cost consumed more than those paying their own way.
Q 10Advertising of which product, banned from US television in 1971, is sometimes cited as a real prisoner's dilemma?
Cigarettes
Cigarettes are the classic case: each maker's adverts largely cancelled out its rival's, so both paid heavily just to stand still, and both stood to gain when the spending stopped.
Q 11In the ultimatum game, what happens to the money on offer if the responder rejects the proposer's split?
Both players get nothing
Both players get nothing, so cold logic says accept any offer. Real people disagree: offers of less than 30% are often rejected, at the rejecter's own expense.
Q 12John Maynard Smith's model of animal conflict names its aggressive and peaceful strategies after which two birds?
Hawk and dove
Hawk and dove stand for escalating a fight and backing down. The biologist set the model out with George Price in a 1973 paper titled 'The logic of animal conflict'.
Q 13John Maynard Keynes likened stock picking to which newspaper competition, won by guessing what others choose?
Q 21Which Hungarian-born mathematician founded game theory as a discipline, proving his minimax theorem in 1928?
John von Neumann
John von Neumann showed that when two players' interests are flatly opposed, the best each can guarantee is equal and opposite, so the game has a definite value.
Q 22Which economist, raised in Vienna, co-wrote the founding 1944 text Theory of Games and Economic Behavior?
Oskar Morgenstern
Oskar Morgenstern was visiting America in 1938 when Hitler took over Vienna, so he chose to stay, and wrote the book there with a mathematician colleague.
Q 23At which university did John Nash write the short doctoral thesis that introduced his famous equilibrium?
Princeton
A beauty contest
A beauty contest, in his telling, asked readers to pick the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, with a prize for whoever matched the most popular choices.
Q 14Which game theory term describes a game such as chess, where one side's gain is exactly the other's loss?
Zero-sum
Zero-sum also describes cutting a cake: a bigger slice for one person leaves exactly that much less for everybody else.
Q 15In game theory's public goods problem, which term describes someone who enjoys a benefit without paying for it?
Free rider
Free rider fits the ships that steer by a lighthouse they never helped to fund, or a crowd watching a fireworks display that somebody else paid for.
Q 16Which illness, first apparent in 1959, kept game theory pioneer John Nash from academic work for years?
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia put Nash in psychiatric hospitals for several years. After 1970 his condition slowly improved, and he was back at academic work by the mid-1980s.
Q 17Studies of which soccer set piece found that players vary their choices much as game theory predicts?
Penalty
Penalty data fit the theory closely: kickers and keepers mix left and right unpredictably, in proportions that do not deviate significantly from a Nash equilibrium.
Q 18Which standoff between Kennedy and Khrushchev is a standard game theory example of nuclear brinkmanship?
Cuban Missile Crisis
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a 13-day confrontation in which each superpower edged toward nuclear war, betting that the other would back down first.
Q 19Which philosopher's Discourse on Inequality supplied the hunting story behind game theory's stag hunt?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau pictured hunters who can only bring down a stag together, each tempted to slip away after a hare he could catch alone. It is also called the assurance game.
Q 20Which Richard Dawkins bestseller devotes a chapter on aggression to game theory's evolutionarily stable strategy?
The Selfish Gene
The Selfish Gene defines the idea as a strategy that, once most of a population adopts it, cannot be bettered by any alternative, so selection penalises every deviation.
Princeton took Nash on after his old professor sent a recommendation letter stating 'He is a mathematical genius.' The thesis that made his name ran to fewer than 30 pages.
Q 24Which think tank employed Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher when they devised the prisoner's dilemma in 1950?
RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation researchers built the puzzle as bare payoffs. The prison story came afterwards, when another mathematician reframed the rewards as jail sentences.
Q 25Which strategy, entered by Anatol Rapoport, won both of Robert Axelrod's repeated prisoner's dilemma tournaments?
Tit for tat
Tit for tat was the simplest entry both times: cooperate first, then repeat whatever the opponent did on the previous move.
Q 26In a Vickrey auction the top sealed offer wins, but which amount does the successful buyer actually pay?
The second-highest bid
The second-highest bid sets the price, which makes honesty the best policy: bidding exactly what the item is worth to you is the dominant strategy. Stamp collectors used the format from 1893.
Q 27Game theory's 'normal form' sets out the players' strategies and payoffs in which kind of layout?
A matrix
A matrix does the job: one player picks a row, the other a column, and the cell where they meet holds a payoff for each. The rival 'extensive form' is drawn as a graph instead.
Q 28In a Nash equilibrium, no player can do better by taking which step while all the others stay put?
Switching strategy
Switching strategy alone never helps at such a point, so nobody has a reason to budge. Nash proved in 1950 that every finite game has one once mixed strategies are allowed.
Q 29In which poker variant, a classic game of imperfect information, did the AI Libratus beat four top professionals?
Texas hold 'em
Texas hold 'em, in its two-player no-limit form, was the battleground. After 120,000 hands over 20 days in 2017, Libratus was more than $1.7 million in chips ahead of the human team.
Q 30Which term, first applied to oil-lease auctions, describes the tendency of the top bidder to have overpaid?
Winner's curse
Winner's curse was first analysed in 1971 by three Atlantic Richfield engineers, who noticed oil companies kept winning offshore drilling leases and then earning unexpectedly low returns.