Abstract
Individual and collective actors are typically engaged in several simultaneous co-evolutionary matching games with their rivals, and this relentless process creates an ever-evolving political-economic landscape. When an actor makes a move that is unfavorable to another actor, the latter is likely to respond with a countermove that nullifies the initial threat, or at least compensates for it. Actors in competitive environments are bound to decide and act under conditions of uncertainty because they rarely have accurate foreknowledge of how their rivals will respond and when they will respond. Just as a competitor makes a strategical or tactical move to improve their standing on a given variable relative to a target competitor, they should expect the latter to counteract with an recursive delayed asymmetric counterforce, that is, with an adaptive non-identical sequence of countermoves (recursive) that is different in kind from its trigger (asymmetry) and that will be launched at some unknown point in the future (delayed). The paper develops my earlier work on this problematic and takes it in new directions that are sensitive to contingency, surprise, and the vagaries of the historical process.
Presenters
Dragos SimandanProfessor, Geography and Tourism Studies, Brock University, Ontario, Canada
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Competition; Delays; Social Systems; Strategic Management; International Relations; Global Studies
