**"I absolutely loved this book, both as a parent and as a nerd."
--Jessica Lahey, author of *The Gift of Failure
**Delightfully witty, refreshingly irreverent, and just a bit
Machiavellian, The Game Theorist's Guide to Parenting looks past the
fads to offer advice you can put into action today.
**
As every parent knows, kids are surprisingly clever negotiators. But how
can we avoid those all-too-familiar wails of "That's not fair!" and "You
can't make me!"? In The Game Theorist's Guide to Parenting, the
award-winning journalist and father of five Paul Raeburn and the game
theorist Kevin Zollman pair up to highlight tactics from the worlds of
economics and business that can help parents break the endless cycle of
quarrels and ineffective solutions. Raeburn and Zollman show that some
of the same strategies successfully applied to big business deals and
politics--such as the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Ultimatum Game--can be
used to solve such titanic, age-old parenting problems as dividing up
toys, keeping the peace on long car rides, and sticking to homework
routines.
Raeburn and Zollman open each chapter with a common parenting dilemma.
Then they show how carefully concocted schemes involving bargains and
fair incentives can save the day. Through smart case studies of game
theory in action, Raeburn and Zollman reveal how parents and children
devise strategies, where those strategies go wrong, and what we can do
to help raise happy and savvy kids while keeping the rest of the family
happy too.
