Maximin Strategy Calculator

About this calculator

The maximin decision rule (Wald's criterion) is a way to choose between strategies when you don't know which future state of the world will occur and you'd rather avoid the worst outcome than chase the best one: for each strategy (row) in a payoff matrix, it finds the minimum payoff across all possible states (columns), then picks the strategy whose minimum is the highest of all the minimums — the "best worst case." It's deliberately pessimistic, which is exactly the point when the downside risk matters more than the upside.

Business strategists use maximin thinking to choose between options — like which market to enter or which supplier to commit to — when the probabilities of different scenarios are unknown or unreliable, game theory students apply it as the classic solution concept for decision-making under uncertainty (as distinct from decision-making under risk, where probabilities are known), and robust engineering and military planners use the same worst-case-optimization logic when a failure mode simply cannot be allowed to happen.