The Planning Game: An Information Economics Approach to Understanding Urban and Environmental Management

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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 economicsx2019; tool kit, game theory x2013; including well-known examples such as the Prisonersx2019; Dilemma, the Stag Hunt game and Follow the Leader x2013; 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.

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Alex Lord worked in the financial services industry before completing a Ph.D. at the University of Manchesterx2019;s School of Environment and Development. He is currently lecturer in the Department of Civic Design at the University of Liverpool.