Austen's fiction is, we might say, not so much about what her characters think as what they think about what other characters think. Simply put, we play games better if we try to understand the thinking of other players. It refers to the ways in which humans learn to make goal-directed rational calculations based on their expectations about other people's rational calculations. He finds her novels preoccupied with "strategic thinking", an idea at the heart of game theory. His book sets out to demonstrate her "game-theoretic world view". Like Freud thinking that Shakespeare arrived at the insights of psychoanalysis a few centuries early, Chwe believes that Austen understood and applied all the main concepts of game theory avant la lettre. Chwe is an expert on game theory, a means of analysing human decision making that is popular in departments of economics and business studies, and that has generated elaborate mathematical models. What about Jane Austen and the French Revolution? Or Sibling Love and Incest in Jane Austen's Fiction? Or The Postcolonial Jane Austen? Now, Michael Chwe, a professor of political science at the University of California, has entered the lists. T here used to be polls among Jane Austen aficionados for the most implausible title of an academic book about her fiction.
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