Reading rivals

The mistake is treating a competitor's behaviour as weather. It is not: they respond to you. A move evaluated against their current behaviour is evaluated against a world that will not exist once you make the move.

Three questions, in this order:

1. What are they actually optimising? (usually not what you assume)
2. What is their best response to our move?
3. Where does the exchange of responses end up, and is that end state acceptable?

Question 3 is the one people skip, and it is where price wars come from.

Workflow