 John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern laid the foundations of classical game theory in their treatise Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (von Neumann &amp; Morgenstern 1944). Following a series of refinements published in the 1950s by numerous theorists, most notably John Nash, game theory then transformed social science over the course of the next several decades. Noncooperative game theory, the more fundamental branch of game theory, explores scenarios where the results of an agent’s actions depend upon what other agents do, and where agents lack external mechanisms for enforcing agreements. More precisely, it provides a model of how agents satisfying certain criteria of rationality interact in games characterized by the actions or strategies available to each of the agents and the payoffs they can achieve. Payoffs in such scenarios are a product of the joint strategy profile that is defined by the actions independently chosen by the respective agents and the state of the world that obtains which reflects aspects of the game that are variable and over which no agent has control. Many scenarios in noncooperative game theory can be fruitfully analyzed using ordinal preferences constructed from agents’ rankings of possible outcomes. However, von Neumann and Morgenstern also introduced a theory of cardinal utility that provides a more precise account of payoffs by using agents’ preferences over lotteries to reflect how much agents prefer one outcome to another. Utilizing this framework, a more varied set of solution concepts was developed to predict how games would be played, and to determine when individual agents are employing optimal strategies and what the consequences of this are for the set of all agents.