It is probably true quite generally that in the history of human thinking, the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet. These lines may have their roots in quite different parts of human culture, in different times or different cultural environments or different religious traditions: hence if they actually meet, that is, if they are at least so much related to each other that a real interaction can take place, then one may hope that new and interesting developments may follow.
—Werner Heisenberg in “The Dao of Physics”The realization that optimization problems are intractable led us to approximation algorithms; the unavailability of information about the future, or the lack of coordination between distributed decision makers, brought us online algorithms; the price of anarchy is the result of one further obstacle: now the distributed decision makers have different objective functions. Incidentally, it is rather surprising that economists had not studied this aspect of strategic behavior before the advent of the Internet. One explanation may be that, for economists, the ideal optimum was never an available option; in contrast, computer scientists are still looking back with nostalgia to the good old days when artifacts and processes could be optimized exactly.
—Christos H. Papadimitriou, Foreword, Algorithmic Game Theory