“The Pitch Files” is a curated series of proposal excerpts, thoughts, and value offerings we’ve crafted for potential clients across various industries. These insights offer a glimpse into how we customise our strategies to address the unique challenges of each sector, along with quick drafts of recommendations for the most effective expansion approaches tailored to their needs—just a taste of the full strategic depth we offer.
Through the prism of global expansion, the decision problem facing ambitious brands is no longer simply: What should we do next? It becomes: What will they do if they see what we do next?
This shift from isolated decision-making to entangled strategy is precisely the shift that Vulnerable Decision Theory (VDT) illuminates. Born from the rationalist project to make sense of paradoxical decision problems (like blackmail, simulation, and prediction), VDT offers not just a novel resolution to toy problems in thought experiments, but a powerful lens for how real-world agents (like international brands) should behave when others are watching, modeling, and mimicking them.
Let’s call this what it is: a theory of expansion under surveillance. And no brand scales without being watched.
When Your Decisions Are Not Your Own
The logic of classical decision theory presumes a kind of splendid isolation. We picture the decision-maker as a node: rational, autonomous, uninspected. This might work well for domestic operations with clear market signals and little interdependence. But in the domain of international expansion, the model breaks.
Why? Because global decisions are read. Mimicked. Feared. Preempted. When your brand announces entry into a new market, you become visible to a lot of agents—local competitors, regulators, NGOs, and yes, sometimes meme accounts. VDT doesn’t assume they all matter equally. It asks: who can act on what they infer?
They’re not just reacting after the fact but predicting your moves, modelling your intentions, planning their counters. You are not making a choice in isolation. You are performing a function in a system of entangled agents.
This is where VDT shines. It gives us a formal (if still evolving) answer to a terrifyingly modern question: What should you do when other actors are simulating your decision-making process and you are vulnerable to their response?
Vulnerability: The Missing Variable in Global Playbooks
VDT begins with a key insight: you are only obligated to account for another agent’s expectations if you are vulnerable to them.
This is the real economy of global expansion. The relevant question isn’t who is watching?, the relevant question is who can affect your outcomes based on what they believe about you?
Your Paris launch might be watched by a Berlin competitor but unless they can do something with that information (e.g., undercut pricing, preempt hiring, mimic messaging), you aren’t vulnerable. But if they can, then your strategic calculus must include what they will think you’re going to do.
And here’s the twist: They might be good at predicting you.
Because your comms team uses the same playbook they’ve seen before. Because your org structure leaks through job postings. Because your decision logic is recursively embedded in your quarterly shareholder letters.
In VDT terms, your “decision algorithm” isn’t private. It’s part of the public record.
VDT in Strategic Practice
Let’s translate the VDT prescription into brand terms:
- Act as if others can inspect your decision-making process, but only where you are vulnerable.
- Optimize not for isolated payoff, but for the performance of your policy in all the (realistic) worlds where other agents can see it, simulate it, and change their behaviour in ways that affect you.
Take the classic expansion scenario:
Should we enter Market X, where a strong incumbent already operates?
Under Causal Decision Theory, you might run an isolated market analysis, see high margins, and go in guns blazing.
Under Vulnerable Decision Theory, you pause.
You ask: If the incumbent sees that we’re about to enter and simulate our intent, what will they do? Are we vulnerable to an aggressive price war? Could they flood the channel? Poach our talent?
If the answer is yes, then the choice to enter is not just about the market. It’s about what the incumbent expects our decision policy to be, and how they might act based on that expectation.
Now your options include signaling cooperation, delaying in order to observe, or sending early signals that make you look unpredictable or unprofitable to fight.
This isn’t just strategic nuance. It’s a qualitatively different mode of reasoning: second-person strategy, rather than first-person optimisation.
Simulation, Branding, and the Semiotics of Decision-Making
Another key VDT move: recognising that simulation doesn’t require literal computation. If an agent can reason about you, if they can predict your playbook, then you exist inside their decision function. You are present in their model of the world.
Brands are especially susceptible to this kind of simulation. In fact, branding itself can be viewed as an intentionally simulatable identity: a stable set of decisions that signal values, priorities, and likely moves.
But this simulability cuts both ways. The same clarity that allows your audience to trust you also allows your competitors to anticipate you.
VDT would advise: Be simulatable where it benefits you; be opaque where it doesn’t.
You want consumers to simulate consistency. You don’t want Amazon to simulate your next six months of international hiring.
Global Expansion as VDT Playground
Let’s list some scenarios where VDT-like reasoning becomes not just helpful, but essential:
- Pre-launch posturing. Signaling intent to enter a market not to follow through, but to shift competitor behaviour.
- Licensing negotiations. Where your partner's perception of your fallback options shapes their willingness to concede.
- Regulatory lobbying. When governments try to predict whether you'll pull out of a market in response to new laws.
- Crisis communications. Where shaping how others simulate your internal logic is the difference between perceived responsibility and moral disaster.
In all these cases, you are being read. And if the reader can hurt or help you, you are vulnerable. VDT says: take that into account.
Towards a Theory of Entangled Global Strategy
VDT doesn’t solve every problem. It doesn’t produce a master algorithm for international success. But it gives us a new kind of object to reason about: the perceived policy, and the set of agents who model it.
And this is, we would argue, the natural epistemic unit for global strategy in the 2020s.
We don’t act in a vacuum. We act in an interlocking network of agents, all watching, all guessing, all vulnerable to one another. The winners of global expansion won’t be the loudest or fastest: they’ll be the ones whose decision processes perform best across worlds where they are being modeled.
Or to put it less formally:
Don’t just optimize your next move.
Optimize for what happens when others think they know your next move (and they care).
