The CBS reality television hit "Survivor", is itself a
carefully crafted
game, defined by a set of strict
rules. Sixteen
players compete for a
real individual pre-tax payoff of $1,000,000. Using majority rules, players successively vote each other out of the game until only one remains, who then claims the million-dollar prize. What has emerged after two seasons seems to be a game of complex timing in cooperation, defection, investment, and signaling
strategies. Of all possible strategies, players most commonly form
alliances with other players to get them to the end of the game. I carefully examine the alliances of "Survivor" using game theory to show that creating alliances is a weakly dominant strategy. I also show that given any n players, a stable alliance must be of size at least INT
+1, and include players of consecutive ability to win the game. Finally, I analyze several real alliances used in different "Survivor" games to show how alliances have worked, or failed, their members in previous plays of "Survivor".
More summaries about the Outwit, Outplay, Outlast--A Game-Theoretic Analysis--Survivor