I came across this interesting article on (mathematical) Game Theory. The most thought-provoking section is at the end of the article, where it describes the "Centipede Game". It is interesting because the logical and rational strategy for playing the "game" leads to modest gains for the players, but an irrational or "altruistic" style of play is more common among human players and can often lead to large gains for some players ( http://www.ams.org/featurecolumn/archive/rationality.html )