Dear Faizuddin Faruqui

Game theory is a mathematical system for analyzing and predicting how humans behave in strategic situations. It uses three distinct concepts to make precise predictions of how people will, or should, interact strategically: strategic thinking, best-reply, and mutual consistency (equilibrium). Strategic thinking assumes that all players form beliefs based on an analysis of what other players may possibly do. The best-reply chooses the best reply given those beliefs. Mutual consistency adjust best responses and beliefs until they reach an equilibrium. In this sense, there is an understandable interest in the development and implementation of interaction social models which tries to understand, predict, manipulate and control the behavior of people, organizations, government, companies, etc. for instance, see Schindler (2012), Xianyu (2010), Wijermans et al. (2013). Everyone that goes aboard on this kind of interaction models must consider the behavior observations of the fifteenth-century philosopher and politic, Niccolò Machiavelli (Wilson et al. 1996).

Machiavelli's primary contribution was his painfully honest observations about human nature Machiavelli (1952). He distinguishes the natural laws that govern how effective leaders exercise power over the human resources and creates a new moral system, deeply rooted in Roman virtue (and vice). He develops his proposal against the conceptions of the Judeo-Christian self-contained moral systems. His ethical system works both as a limit to human possibilities and as the source of human virtue. Machiavelli says that human nature is aggressive and only in some measure able to be manipulated. In this sense, he observes that under competitive conditions the human bean pursue his main goals with increasing levels of ruthlessness (Machiavelli 1952; Machiavelli 1965; Machiavelli 2001).

It is important to note that Machiavelli showed consideration for moral individuals (Leary et al. 1986), and recognized that exist individuals able to sacrifice their own self-interest in order improve the interests of others. However, he did question the regular occurrence of self-sacrifice and ideal altruism behavior in the real world.

A Machiavellian individual (Calhoun 1969) is one who employs aggressive, manipulative, exploiting and devious moves in order to achieve personal and organizational objectives. These moves are undertaken according to perceived feasibility with secondary consideration (what is necessary under circumstances) to the feelings, needs and/or rights of others.

Although most of what Machiavelli had to say was intended to provide advice on how successful leaders exercise power over political organizations, his views can (and should) be applied to today's business executives and organizations, given that all organizations are subject to power politics. Machiavelli believed that all leaders deal with the fact that human beings compete for power. Therefore, it makes sense for leaders to see themselves as engaged in two different conflicts: internal and external with "followers" and "competitors" (Wilson et al. 1996).

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This may not be helpful - I am wondering if this application of game theory is a good fit. In my limited experience, game theory involves some kind of competition between players, say competing for a prize or a limited resource. 

Work on exoskeletons in the 1970s focussed on the concept of "man amplifiers", where applicable power (product of forces and velocities, torques and angular velocities) is amplified over multiple degrees of freedom, typically associated with the exoskeleton being larger and stronger than the human operator. The available degrees of freedom would be limited compared with the human operator on his/her own and the bandwidth of available power limited as well.

The human operator must plan the exoskeleton operation such that the degrees of freedom available match the task impedance or "degrees of constraint".  Also such that the available bandwidth is adequate.

An interesting issue with exoskeletons is the level of bilateral coupling through the mechanism, i.e. how well can the operator feel the interaction with the environment? 

To investigate the separation of the real-time control of the exoskeleton and the task planning I would immediately jump to a control hierarchy model where lower level "reflexive" control is governed by higher level task breakdowns.  NIST published a lot of work in this area, starting with the NASREM project.