Editing Game theory (section)

===Project management===

Sensible decision-making is critical for the success of projects.  In project management, game theory is used to model the decision-making process of players, such as investors, project managers, contractors, sub-contractors, governments and customers.  Quite often, these players have competing interests, and sometimes their interests are directly detrimental to other players, making project management scenarios well-suited to be modeled by game theory.

Piraveenan (2019)<ref name="Piraveenan 2019">{{cite journal |last1=Piraveenan |first1=Mahendra |title=Applications of Game Theory in Project Management: A Structured Review and Analysis |journal=Mathematics |date=2019 |volume=7 |issue=9 |page=858 |doi=10.3390/math7090858 |doi-access=free }}</ref> in his review provides several examples where game theory is used to model project management scenarios. For instance, an investor typically has several investment options, and each option will likely result in a different project, and thus one of the investment options has to be chosen before the project charter can be produced. Similarly, any large project involving subcontractors, for instance, a construction project, has a complex interplay between the main contractor (the project manager) and subcontractors, or among the subcontractors themselves, which typically has several decision points. For example, if there is an ambiguity in the contract between the contractor and subcontractor, each must decide how hard to push their case without jeopardizing the whole project, and thus their own stake in it. Similarly, when projects from competing organizations are launched, the marketing personnel have to decide what is the best timing and strategy to market the project, or its resultant product or service, so that it can gain maximum traction in the face of competition. In each of these scenarios, the required decisions depend on the decisions of other players who, in some way, have competing interests to the interests of the decision-maker, and thus can ideally be modeled using game theory.

Piraveenan<ref name="Piraveenan 2019" /> summarizes that two-player games are predominantly used to model project management scenarios, and based on the identity of these players, five distinct types of games are used in project management.

* Government-sector–private-sector games (games that model [[public–private partnership]]s)
* Contractor–contractor games
* Contractor–subcontractor games
* Subcontractor–subcontractor games
* Games involving other players

In terms of types of games, both cooperative as well as non-cooperative, normal-form as well as extensive-form, and zero-sum as well as non-zero-sum  are used to model various project management scenarios.