Decision making is perhaps the most fundamental intellectual enterprise. Indeed, the word intelligent comes from the Latin roots inter (between) + legĕre (to choose). The study of motives and methods regarding how decisions might and should be made has long captured the interest of philosophers and social scientists and, more recently, of engineers and computer scientists. An important objective of such studies is to establish a framework within which to define rational behavior and solution concepts that result in appropriate choices. The development of formal theories of decision making, however, has proven to be a challenging and complex task. The reason is simple: Every nontrivial decision problem involves multiple stakeholders. A stakeholder is any entity that has an interest in the consequences of a decision, whether or not it has direct control over the decision. Unless the interests of all stakeholders coincide perfectly (a rare occurrence), conflicts will exist. The central challenge of any theory of decision making, therefore, is how to make choices in the presence of conflicting stakeholder interests.

The way a group of stakeholders deals with conflict is a function of its sociality: Conflict can result in either competition or cooperation.