To Mine or Not to Mine?: Using Game Theory to Explain the Decision-Making Process in Asteroid Mining Investigations

Introduction

Knowledge, and in particular scientific and technological knowledge, is usually the product of a complex social network in which innumerable agents interact. Even the lonely inventor or discoverer applies in her discoveries numerous items of knowledge she has acquired in the past through social interactions. The social study of science is a mature academic field since at least the mid 20^th century, and has been approached from almost all branches of the social science: sociology, anthropology, political science, and obviously, economics. However, there has been a not easily understandable reluctance by part of most researchers in those areas to apply what some scholars consider to be the most nuclear intellectual tool in the social sciences: game theory (e.g., Gintis, 2009). As one of us has commented in other papers (Zamora Bonilla, 2006, 2007), this neglection has been particularly regrettable in the case of the constructivist sociologists of scientific knowledge, for, though the interests of the scientists and other social agents (and, in the case of authors like Bruno Latour, the ‘interests’ of the rest of other relevant things, which he calls ‘actants’) are considered by these authors as one of the major explanatory factors of the social situations they try to illuminate, they hardly take into account the problems and the possibilities associated to the strategic decisions that arise once we have more than one interacting agent, in particular the existence of several possible outcomes, not all of them being equally efficient for the agents, nor all of them equally constituting a possible equilibrium in the game that those strategies create. In particular, game theory allows to understand in an easy way some ‘constructivist’ conclusions that have created too much confusion and polemic in the last decades; for example, it gives a clear meaning to the notion that the epistemic value of the products of a research process may not be optimal, but showing that this does not amount to something as a complete rejection of the ‘objectivity of science’, for it simply means that getting an epistemically better output would have had some ‘costs’ for some agents that have preferred not to incur in them, if they have had the chance, but it does not entail that the output has no epistemic value (only that it does not have the possible maximum value... which is compatible with having a very high value). As the product of a ‘social construction’, scientific and technological knowledge has simply the quality level that the combination of the interests and possibilities of the engaged agents have allowed; being a ‘social construction’, hence, does not entail that, for example, a scientific theory is not a good theory as an item of knowledge, exactly in the same way as being a ‘social construction’ does not entail that a hospital is a bad hospital.

In this paper, we want to illustrate the capacity of game theory to make us understand in an interesting way the social processes of interaction that underlie the production of techno-scientific knowledge, by applying game-theoretical tools to a particular example. We don’t pretend to develop something like a full-grown theory about the ‘social construction of science’, but just to offer an impression of how the application of these formal tools might look like. Of course, it is possible to apply them to other, very different aspects of research processes than those chosen by us. The essential thing to take into account is that, in order to understand a research episode from the point of view of game theory, we need to conceptualise it according to the following list of items: