Thomas Schelling was an American political economist, who received his doctorate from Harvard in 1951 after writing his dissertation mostly at night while helping to implement the Marshall Plan in Europe. He went on to a career in the faculties of Yale, Harvard, and the University of Maryland, College Park, while also working with the RAND Corporation as an adjunct fellow and occasionally full time researcher. In 2005 Schelling received the Nobel Prize in Economics alongside Robert Aumann for his founding work in evolutionary game theory. He also co-founded the Center for International Affairs at Harvard, and served as the president of the American Economic Association.
Schelling’s body of work near the end of his term at Yale, and through his early years on the Harvard faculty, became the 1960 book The Strategy of Conflict. In this book, Schelling presents a theory of conflict through the lens of international affairs, where political rival states may use cooperation as a tool to reduce the cost of conflict from that of war – since war is usually costly to both the winning and losing side – to more on the level of bargaining. This usually requires communication, but states in conflict may not communicate fully with each other, so strategies of communicating intent through visible action can be employed instead.
Schelling introduced the idea of a “focal point”: a solution that people will tend to use in the absence of communication, because it seems natural, special, or relevant to them. In a more expanded description, Schelling wrote of it as:
“[a] focal point for each person’s expectation of what the other expects him to expect to be expected to do”.
This description, if reasonably precise, does contort the word “expect” to a severe degree. A more illustrative example has Tom describing a shared goal between two people who do not have the ability to communicate with each other in the pre-cell phone era:
Tom liked to tell a story, over a nice glass of wine, about how he would find a friend in Washington DC if they were separated and had no way of easily finding each other. Essentially, he’d do a thought experiment about where the person might go if they were lost to meet with Tom, and then Tom would do the same thought experiment for himself. The end result might be that the two people could meet at a landmark they both knew, such as the post office. They might both go to that place because they knew it was a landmark that the other person might go to. This led to his important idea – focal points or ‘Schelling points’ – in game theory, on which Tom had a big impact.
https://blog.oup.com/2017/01/thomas-schelling-geoengineering/
There was no original coiner of note, but Schelling’s focal point was later named the Schelling Point by convention.