Economics as a “Story Engine”: John D. McDonald and Business as Game and Gamble
探讨约翰·D·麦克唐纳如何将博弈论用作商业新闻的“故事引擎”，从纪实作家转型为商业记者，并揭示博弈论如何帮助他刻画企业高管的人物深度。
Abstract John D. McDonald was a writer and editor best known for his work at Fortune magazine in the 1950s and 1960s and as the ghostwriter of the memoirs of Alfred P. Sloan. McDonald was also the first person to popularize game theory. In this article I argue that game theory played a key role in McDonald's transition from documentary writer to business journalist. Game theory gave McDonald a journalistic device to discover business stories and to give those stories a driving tension; he called it a “story engine.” After decades writing with game theory, it began to serve a different purpose for McDonald. By coding business stories as games, McDonald gained insight into the characters, corporate executives who were often brief in explanations and shallow in self-understanding. McDonald's career gives us a glimpse at an extraordinary transformation of how a set of scholarly ideas can become a literary resource for vividness (of stories) and depth (of characters).