I feel like a lot of your examples could be captured perfectly well by game theory, and thus can hardly be considered counterexamples. For instance the bush/tree example—it’s common in game theory that one individual benefitting leads to another individual doing worse, that doesn’t mean that the individuals aren’t optimizing for utility.
I feel like a lot of your examples could be captured perfectly well by game theory, and thus can hardly be considered counterexamples. For instance the bush/tree example—it’s common in game theory that one individual benefitting leads to another individual doing worse, that doesn’t mean that the individuals aren’t optimizing for utility.