Recently, after seeing Ron Howard’s remarkable film A Beautiful Mind, I have been studying the life of John Nash, a Nobel Laureate in Economics, and Nash’s revolutionary game theory which has become known as the “Nash Equilibrium.”
The theory “is a solution concept of a game involving two or more players, in which each player is assumed to know the equilibrium strategies of the other players, and no player has anything to gain by changing only his own strategy unilaterally. ” (from Wikipedia)
The theory is a way of predicting what will happen if several players are making decisions at the same time when the outcome depends on the decisions of the others.
It occurred to me that our Consortium is a Nash equilibrium. Each library (or “player” if you will) is making the best decision possible for that library, while taking into account the decisions being made by the other libraries at the same time.
And the end result is a balance that allows all the players to win together.
Isn’t that what we do at the ALC? Maybe we should change our name to the Abilene Library Equilibrium.
