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.