Rational choice presupposes that people do what they like better than any available alternative. If, however, we mistrust what they declare to like or what psychology is supposed to tell us about it (a pardonable enough mistrust), we can only infer what they like from observing what they do. We...

Most social scientists' views of conflict and cooperation in society are shaped by very elementary, one-off, two by two symmetric simultaneous move games like prisoner's dilemma, chicken, assurance or stag hunt. We think that this diet of examples leads to biased accounts in particular of...