 This phenomenon complicates applications of classical game theory to intelligent animals. However, it clearly doesn’t vitiate it altogether, since people (and other animals) often don’t reverse their preferences. (If this weren’t true, the successful auction models and other s-called ‘mechanism designs’ would be mysterious.) Interestingly, the leading theories that aim to explain why hyperbolic discounters might often behave in accordance with RPT themselves appeal to game theoretic principles.  Ainslie (1992,  2001) has produced an account of people as communities of internal bargaining interests, in which subunits based on short-term, medium-term and long-term interests face conflict that they must resolve because if they don’t, and instead generate an internal Hobbesian breakdown  (Section 1),  outside agents who avoid the Hobbesian outcome can ruin them all. The device of the Hobbesian tyrant is unavailable to the brain. Therefore, its behavior (when system-level insanity is avoided) is a sequence of self-enforcing equilibria of the sort studied by game-theoretic public choice literature on coalitional bargaining in democratic legislatures. That is, the internal politics of the brain consists in ‘logrolling’  (Stratmann 1997).  These internal dynamics are then partly regulated and stabilized by the wider social games in which coalitions (people as wholes over temporal subparts of their biographies) are embedded  (Ross 2005a ,  pp. 334–353). (For example: social expectations about someone’s role as a salesperson set behavioral equilibrium targets for the logrolling processes in their brain.) This potentially adds further relevant elements to the explanation of why and how stable institutions with relatively transparent rules are key conditions that help people more closely resemble straightforward economic agents, such that classical game theory finds reliable application to them as entire units.