Check out this brilliant post by Zach Patton of The 13th Floor in which he compares a pivotal scene in this summer's biggest blockbuster to the way cities compete to have major employers move within their borders.
If you're familiar with game theory (which you can brush up by watching another great movie - A Beautiful Mind), you probably have heard of "the prisoner's dilemma." As Patton explains, businesses play a version of the prisoner's dilemma game with cities that show interest in them:
It's the same situation for cities competing against one another for the same business, [Greg] LeRoy [the executive director of Good Jobs First] says. The cities are prohibited from discussing their negotiations with one another, and the business uses that to its advantage, playing each city off the other in an effort to get more lucrative incentives.
Philadelphia should remember this when it tries to lure Boeing away from Chicago or Microsoft from Seattle. Or maybe when it deals with Unisys again.
You can read Patton's whole article, without the Batman references, unfortunately, in this month's issue of Governing Magazine.