I will leave Ashu's cheap and false rant against me for some other time. Here, I am bringing a response to Ashu's comment to the anonymous student's version of the application of the Game Theory to the current conflict. Nepe ________________________________ Response from the anonymous student: {QUOTE: "Both player understand that the king is likely to give up at some finite time T (No one can rule forever, afterall)." This is debatable on two counts. Yes, the present king can't rule for ever. But, in theory, he can be succeeded by his son, thus making the transition from him to the son a continuous affair, and thus elongating the time T. Alternatively, possibilities do not exist in one direction only : there exist (theoretical) possibilities that the Maoists might give up or that the parties might also give up being together with the Maoists.} I actually think the assumption gives even better result when we think about monarchy, in stead of the king. While king can’t rule forever, given statistiscal data available, one can say no dynasty can rule forever. Once we assume the king knows this, we can fairly put a date T. Let’s say T=1000 years(i.e. based on history, the king knows his dynasty can’t survive more than 1000 years). The result holds in this case with a quite good implication, that if he is looking for welfare of his dynasty, he better give up immediately which also conforms to our intuition (as long as the parties put positive probability that they will coopt the Maoist strategy). I now discuss briefly with the theoretical possibility that the king might not give up with some positive probability, so that we can see how the results look. This is a mirror situation for a crack in the coalition, given what we have assumed so far. Fortunately, it actually explains how the politics is being run in our country rightnow in my view. In this model, the king is quite obstinate. Suppose with probability q1 the king thinks he (or as explained above, the dynasty of Shah) will never give up, and with probability q2 the PCM(Parties Coalition With The Maoists) will never give up. Obviously, the resoluteness and intransigence of the players do matter in this case. Who should look more resolute in this case? PCM or the king? In this case, let G1 be the cdf of king, and G2 be the cdf of the PCM; when they are surrendering type. Of course, if they tend to slug it out until infinity, the whole cdf concept doesn’t work, since that infinite fighting with each other in itself is a unique Nash Equilibrium. I try to be brief on this proof too. I urge the readers to look at the literature on the famous War Of Attrition games where these arguments are considered in elementary levels, so I consider them as obvious for brevity. Arguments without detailed proofs: (please look any standard text books for this if they are not fairly intuitive to you. One good source is this latest paper Yossi Feinberg and Andrzej Skrzypacz (2005) “Uncertainty about Uncertainty and Delay in Bargaining.” Econometrica 73 (1) pp. 69-91.)[again, these are not assumptions]