> Has Game Theory been applied to economics in a meaningful and useful way? Would you characterize the people working in this field as left or right or somewhere in between? Not a leading question. I'm completely in the dark on the entire subject.
I'm sure others will know more than me about this, but the short answer is yes, game theory has been applied to a lot of topics in economics. For example, in industrial organization (the study of individual industries and market structure), the state of the art seems to be that in big, oligopolistic industries, prices are indeterminate (i.e. not determined by marginal cost, etc.) because they depend on whether big firms can or cannot maintain tacit cooperation to restrict output and keep prices high. These tacit interactions between firms are analyzed using game theory. Is this left wing? No, not really, but it is arguably subversive of the right wing's favorite picture of the economy, where price equals marginal cost and everything is for the best in the best of worlds. In fact, game theory can be said to be generally subversive of the right wing economic vision, for the following reason. The Right's foundational moral/political interpretation of the market consists of this syllogism: the market is always optimal because every transaction is voluntary, therefore no transaction will ever happen unless it makes both parties better off. Game theory totally subverts that idea, because it shows how individual decisions are interdependent, and therefore, both parties can rationally "freely choose" things that end up making them both worse off, as in the prisoner's dilemma. The ideal solution in game theory is usually coordination, which, to prevent free-riding, requires constraint on individual choices. Sam Bowles or Herb Gintis (I forget which one) wrote a book recently arguing for some kind of grand unification of the social sciences based on game theory. They're certainly left-wing. (Unless you want to be crabbily sectarian about it.)
SA