John Forbes Nash Jr.

The Nash Institute: A New Policy Forum on the Block

Jon Gulson
2 min readOct 29, 2024

John Nash’s game theory was based on John’s belief the proper route of travel to the ultimate truth can only be reached through experimental economics in relation to games played by human players.

Nash’s original bargaining solution which was published in 1950, was an axiomatic solution of idealizations determining a non-zero sum outcome among two players who each maximise their welfare. Nash equated this solution to small amounts of money, and in later life toured the world and lectured on Ideal Money in the years prior the release of Bitcoin.

The Nash program which subsequently developed from the early literature is generally understood to be non-cooperative analysis of Nash’s cooperative bargaining. The Nash Institute promotes Nash bargaining to achieve public policy goals, with the main assumption being Bitcoin is a non-cooperative and self-enforcing implementation of Nash’s Ideal Money proposal and that furthermore John Nash is the most realistic Satoshi Nakamoto candidate.

So what if the properties behind Bitcoin can be leveraged to achieve public policy goals? What if Bitcoin is a non-cooperative iteration of Nash’s Ideal Money, which can be subsequently modelled cooperatively? This is a question to be answered through trial, error, and experimentation.

It is here we consider John Nash’s famous equilibrium idea set from his initial game theory which spoke of transferability and comparability of payoffs as measured in utility units. Nash felt the study of cooperative bargaining could be unnecessarily restrictive as it requires extra-game collaboration, so concluded the problem of analysing cooperative games becomes the problem of obtaining a suitable, and convincing, non-cooperative model for the negotiation.

Therefore The Nash Institute has been established to promote this line of thinking and devote a policy forum to John Forbes Nash Jr., who ranks alongside Adam Smith as one of the most famous and citable economists of modern times.

--

--