Game theory is used by all behavioral sciences, but its development has long centered around tools for relatively simple games and toy systems, such as the economic interpretation of equilibrium outcomes. Our contribution, compositional game theory, permits another approach of equally general appeal: the high-level design of large games for expressing complex architectures and representing real-world institutions faithfully. Compositional game theory, grounded in the mathematics underlying programming languages, and introduced here as a general computational framework, increases the parsimony of game representations with abstraction and modularity, accelerates search and design, and helps theorists across disciplines express real-world institutional complexity in well-defined ways. Relative to existing approaches in game theory, compositional game theory is especially promising for solving game systems with long-range dependencies, for comparing large numbers of structurally related games, and for nesting games into the larger logical or strategic flows typical of real world policy or institutional systems.

翻译：博弈论被所有行为科学所使用，但其发展长期以来围绕相对简单的游戏和玩具系统工具展开，例如对均衡结果的经济学解释。我们提出的贡献——组合博弈论，允许另一种同样具有普遍吸引力的方法：大规模游戏的高层设计，以表达复杂架构并忠实地再现现实世界制度。组合博弈论基于编程语言背后的数学基础，在此作为通用计算框架引入，通过抽象性和模块化提高了游戏表征的简洁性，加速了搜索与设计，并帮助跨学科理论家以明确定义的方式表达现实世界的制度复杂性。相较于博弈论现有方法，组合博弈论在解决具有长程依赖关系的博弈系统、比较大量结构相关的博弈，以及将博弈嵌套进现实世界政策或制度系统典型的大型逻辑或战略流程中尤为有前景。