In many applications of Game Theory, a player is a collective such as a household, team, political party, country or the like. Usually, this is understood as an idealization. In games where, say, countries are modeled as players, the "real" players are the individual citizens, with their individual goals and individual decisions and individual free will. It's only because this "true" game is too big and unwieldy to analyze that, it is held, game theorists model players as they do.

      Here, we advance the thesis that it *IS* really that way: that in large part, collectives are like individual people, and may be thought of as such. And, perhaps, not only in Game Theory.