The
Planning Game: An Information Economics Approach to Understanding Urban and Environmental
Management
Trading information is an essential aspect of the
negotiations that underpin planning practice across the globe.
In this book, Alex Lord uses information economics
to outline a way of thinking about these negotiations that places the strategies that
actors in the planning game use at the heart of the debate.
Dialogue between economics and planning theorists
has been, until now, rare. Lord argues that information economics’ tool kit, game theory
– including well-known examples such as the Prisoners’ Dilemma, the Stag Hunt game and
Follow the Leader – offers an analytical framework ideally suited to unpacking planning
processes.
This use of game theory to understand how
counterparties interact draws together two distinct bodies of literature: firstly the
mainstream economics treatment of games in abstract form and, secondly, accounts of actual
bargaining in planning practice from a host of international empirical studies.
Providing a novel alternative to existing theories
of planning, The Planning Game provides an
explanation of how agencies interact in shaping the trajectory of development through the
application of game theory to planning practice.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part 1
1. Planning in the ‘Information Age’
2. Is There Something Wrong with Planning Theory?
3. Is There an Alternative Way of Understanding Planning?
4. The Infusion of Economics into Planning Thought
Part 2
5. Introducing the Planning Game
6. Conflict, Power and Risk
7. Bargaining, Negotiation and Tactics
8. Team Games, Coalitions and Collaboration
9. Putting the Planning Game in Context
208 pages, Paperback