Okay, hey Levitt, what is your personal favorite Jane Austen book?

From WNYC and APM, American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio.

The podcast that explores the hidden side of everything.

Here's your host, Stephen Dupner.

Steve Levitt, my Freakonomics friend and co-author, teaches at the University of Chicago

in the economics department, not the literature department.

So when I asked him about Jane Austen...

Oh man, I didn't she write a book called Emma?

I wasn't so surprised that the conversation kind of stalled out.

Now why would I ask an economist about Jane Austen, a novelist who died in 1817?

Because today's show is about Game Theory.

All right, Levitt, define Game Theory for me.

I would define Game Theory as the study of the strategic interactions between a small number

of adversaries, usually two or three competitors.

So that sounds pretty simple, doesn't it?

Levitt has written several papers and involved Game Theory, mostly papers about sports and

gambling and cheating, things like that.

So how does it actually work?

Well, here it gets a bit more complicated.

Yeah, so Game Theory, the promise of Game Theory...

So one of the predictions of Game Theory is that when you are in...

Oh well, I'd say, okay, wait, let me take a...

...