While the Chicago School was disputing policy primacy with the S-C-P paradigm, there were developments in another part of the forest (Shubik, 1980, p. 21):

There is a history of mathematical models of oligopolistic competition dating from Cournot (1838) to the theory of games. There is also a literature generated by institutional economists, lawyers, and administrators interested in formulating and implementing public policy. It has been the tendency of these groups to work almost as though the other did not exist.

The founders of the S-C-P approach had rejected contemporary economic theory as inadequate for the analysis of imperfectly competitive markets. But game theory, which extends neoclassical price theory to environments of incomplete and imperfect information, provides a natural framework for the analysis of strategic behavior.
Game theory directs attention toward the realism of a model’s assumptions (Fudenberg and Tirole, 1987, p. 176):


Game theory has had a deep impact on the theory of industrial organization . . . The reason it has been embraced by a majority of researchers in the field is that it imposes some discipline on theoretical thinking. It forces economists to specify the strategic variables, their timing, and the information structure faced by firms. As is often the case in economics, the researcher learns as much from constructing the model . . . as from solving it because in constructing the model one is led to examine its realism. (Is the timing of entry plausible? Which variables are costly to change in the short run? Can firms observe their rivals’ prices, capacities, or technologies in the industry under consideration? Etc.)


Like Pandora, who loosed the ills of the world and found they could not be closed up again, the Chicago School invoked formal theory in its contest with the S-C-P approach, and found it could not close it up again. Faced with the fact that game theoretic models reproduce, as often as not, the conclusions of the S-C-P paradigm, one reaction of the Chicago School was to reject the use of game-theoretic models (Baxter, 1983, p. 320):


What concerns me is that the economists have rather lapped the bar and the courts. Quite frankly, I do not want them back in the courts talking about new and not well-understood justifications for intervention, some of which sounds [sic] like the half-baked oligopoly theories of twenty years ago (although they are not).
哪位能给翻译下这部分呢。万分感谢！！