Game theory is a collection of models meant to be used when there's a lack of clear communication and trust between two or more rational agents.
The primary historical application of this concept was by US and allied leaders attempting to figure out the meaning behind Soviet actions while also subtly but clearly communicating their own actions to Soviet leadership—which was notoriously opaque, but still quite rational in its behaviors.
This field of inquiry later forked into an array of fields and studies, each focused on elements of that larger concept of decoding, understanding, and communicating within a context of imperfect information and transmission.
One such exploratory side-path was oriented around the concept of "common knowledge"—basically, what does everyone (or essentially everyone) know, and can that shared collection of knowledge be used to communicate across obscured or noisy channels?
One of the pioneers in this space was an economist named Thomas Schelling, who proposed that there were shared bundles of knowledge possessed by more or less everyone in a given society, and by tapping into those collections of shared understandings, we can communicate and even orchestrate our actions to a certain degree, should we need to do so.
Probably the best-known bit of research on this concept comes from a study conducted by Schelling for which he and his team asked New Yorkers where they would go if they were meant to meet with another New York City local—a stranger—if they could not communicate with that stranger when and where to meet.
By far the most common response was "Grand Central Terminal at noon."
This response—this time and this location—were considered to be "focal points," sometimes called "Schelling points," for New York City locals, as it seemed like the most logical place and time to meet for them, but importantly, they also assumed other people (other NYC locals) would come up with the same place and time.
So while they might have their own "most logical" location for their neighborhood, for their friends, for their industry colleagues—next to the Wall Street bull statue when the market closes for stock traders, maybe—because they didn't know anything about the other person except that they were fellow NYC residents, they simplified their answer to something they assumed everyone with those base-level attributes would have in common.
The concept of Schelling points has been further (and more broadly) tested over the years, and has been shown to be fairly consistent—though it's unclear how and why these focal points form, and by what mechanism we determine our local points of focus on a person-to-person basis: how we simplify, and if there's a modelable mechanism at play.
It does seem to offer pathways through which we might better coordinate assumptions, goals, and actions, though, as it could help inform both laws and un-legislated norms which serve the communities in which they're applied, while also allowing individuals to better coordinate with strangers about whom we know little or nothing, but with whom we logically share at least some fundamental goals and understandings.
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