Normal-form representation erases the communication and enforcement structures that make tactics work.

Evidence

While it is instructive and intellectually satisfying to see how such tactics as threats, commitments, and promises can be absorbed into an enlarged, abstract “supergame” (game in “normal form”), it should be emphasized that we cannot learn anything about those tactics by studying games that are already in normal form. The objects of our study, namely, these tactics together with the communication and enforcements structures that they depend on, and the timing of moves, have all disappeared by the time the game is in normal form. What we want is a theory that systematizes the study of the various universal ingredients that make up the move-structure of games; too abstract a model will miss them. — Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 356

Categorization

• SEED: A caution that abstracting away institutional structure destroys the very phenomenon under study — an angle for the reader’s enforcement-market analysis.

Related

• Formal game theory abstracted away the communication and enforcement systems it needs (similarity 0.82)
• Strategic principles in mixed-motive games cannot be derived purely analytically (similarity 0.79)
• Game theory clarifies deterrence problems but remains too abstract to apply directly (similarity 0.79)