Abstract

This article is extracted from a forthcoming book, ‘Natural Justice’. It is a nontechnical introduction to the part of game theory immediately relevant to social contract theory. The latter part of the article reviews how concepts such as trust, responsibility, and authority can be seen as emergent phenomena in models that take formal account only of equilibria in indefinitely repeated games. Key Words: game theory • equilibrium • evolutionary stability • reciprocity • folk theorem • trust • altruism • responsibility • authority.