This report documents the design and initial testing of a prototype game that asks whether the U.S.-China relationship can be managed to achieve mutual security and prosperity. This game was one of two games intended to represent different images of how the international system works. The authors provide information on the game's design, the results of two playtests, and suggestions for future elaboration and use of this game.

Coupled Competition

A Prototype Game to Explore the U.S.-China Relationship

David A. Shlapak, Colin Levaunt, Gregory Smith

ResearchPublished Jun 23, 2025

This report documents Coupled Competition, a game that was developed for a broader project on U.S.-China economic competition. Coupled Competition explores the U.S.-China relationship and whether it can be managed to prevent the relationship's competitive dimensions from overshadowing opportunities for mutual gain and security. This game is one of two games that are intended to represent different perspectives on how the international system works or what basic principles drive the global order.

In this report, the authors provide information on the game's design, the results of two playtests, and suggestions for future elaboration and use of this game. The playtests incorporated two models of each side's information about the other. In one case, each side had perfect information about the other, while in the second case, that information was distorted with random errors. Although the results were creatively similar, systemic stability was more fragile, and both sides invested considerably more in security in the second playtest compared with the first.

Further development of Coupled Competition could explore the effects of imperfect information, introduce exogenous events, and constrain players to operate within the limits of a specific strategy.

This report is the fourth of a four-part series in which RAND researchers considered different aspects of U.S.-China economic competition. Part 1 presents economic and institutional analyses of U.S.-China economic competition. Part 2 presents the results of a participatory foresight exercise to understand the long-term path for ensuring U.S. economic health. Part 3 describe another economic competition game that explores the dynamics of multiple countries trying to ensure their own economic health.

Key Findings

  • Each team had perfect information about the other team's moves and status in the first playtest. As a result, the players avoided a security competition, and each team devoted most of its resources to investment and consumption to rapidly grow its economy and popularity.
  • In the first playtest, the Balance of Power index, which represented the dyadic relationship's overall stability, also increased steadily. However, one team's slow responses to changes in the other's strategy increased the gap between the teams' security scores and initiated a modest decrease in the system's stability in the final few moves.
  • In the second playtest, information provided to each side about the other was randomly distorted. This approach more closely resembled the reality of the international system than the approach in the first playtest.
  • The second playtest's results did not differ dramatically from the first. One notable change is that imperfect information led to misjudgments about the other side's behavior. These, in turn, resulted in more-dramatic fluctuations in the Balance of Power index and a significant increase in security expenditures by both sides.

Recommendations

  • It would be worthwhile to further refine the game's representation of information availability by introducing a negative bias (e.g., seeing the adversary as spending more on security than was actually the case, feeling more insecure than believed by the other side), which is more reflective of observed tendencies in human thought.
  • The authors also recommend adding three elements — event cards (exogenous events that affect one or both sides' strategy), strategic motivations (to constrain players to pursue specific goals), and information-sharing options (to allow teams to control whether the results provided to the other side are accurate) — that were originally envisioned but left out of the tested versions.
  • The formulas contained in the game engine could be developed into a more elegantly programmed application that can more quickly and easily accept inputs and produce outputs.
  • The game engine also could be developed into a packaged and playable application that any two people (or multiplayer teams) could employ without requiring a game control.
  • The most elaborate future development would be to build an automated agent that is capable of playing either side starting from one set of preprogrammed strategies and could adapt its strategies as the game progresses.
  • In the most ambitious version, this game could be hosted on an externally facing website to allow data collection on hundreds or more iterations.

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Shlapak, David A., Colin Levaunt, and Gregory Smith, Coupled Competition: A Prototype Game to Explore the U.S.-China Relationship. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2025. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1947-4.html.
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This research was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and conducted within the Acquisition and Technology Policy Program of the RAND National Security Research Division (NSRD).

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