How to Think About Incentives and Staking

We can think about these systems as essentially games with a bunch of players. The first thing that we want to say about the players is that they're rational. And this of course means that they're acting in their self-interest. But even if we try to look at these actions, it's very difficult to know ahead of time what they are. So you'd have to assume something rational in order to create a model at all.