This is a paperback edition of a major contribution to the field, first published in hard covers in 1977. The book outlines a general theory of rational behaviour consisting of individual decision theory, ethics, and game theory as its main branches. Decision theory deals with a rational pursuit of individual utility; ethics with a rational pursuit of the common interests of society; and game theory with an interaction of two or more rational individuals, each pursuing his own interests in a rational manner.
This is a paperback edition of a major contribution to the field, first published in hard covers in 1977. The book outlines a general theory of rational behaviour consisting of individual decision theory, ethics, and game theory as its main branches. Decision theory deals with a rational pursuit of individual utility; ethics with a rational pursuit of the common interests of society; and game theory with an interaction of two or more rational individuals, each pursuing his own interests in a rational manner.
The connection between economics and ethics is as old as economics itself, and central to both disciplines. The essays included in the present volume provide an analysis of the connections between ethics and economics as viewed from several different - oft
When von Neumann's and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior appeared in 1944, one thought that a complete theory of strategic social behavior had appeared out of nowhere. However, game theory has, to this very day, remained a fast-growing assemblage of models which have gradually been united in a new social theory - a theory that is far from being completed even after recent advances in game theory, as evidenced by the work of the three Nobel Prize winners, John F. Nash, John C. Harsanyi, and Reinhard Selten. Two of them, Harsanyi and Selten, have contributed important articles to the present volume. This book leaves no doubt that the game-theoretical models are on the right track to becoming a respectable new theory, just like the great theories of the twentieth century originated from formerly separate models which merged in the course of decades. For social scientists, the age of great discover ies is not over. The recent advances of today's game theory surpass by far the results of traditional game theory. For example, modem game theory has a new empirical and social foundation, namely, societal experiences; this has changed its methods, its "rationality. " Morgenstern (I worked together with him for four years) dreamed of an encompassing theory of social behavior. With the inclusion of the concept of evolution in mathematical form, this dream will become true. Perhaps the new foundation will even lead to a new name, "conflict theory" instead of "game theory.
The papers appearing in this Volume were selected from a collec tion of papers presented at the Internationa~ Symposium on Extrema~ Methods and Systems Ana~ysis on the Occasion of Professor A. Charnes' 60th Birthday, at the University of Texas in Austin, 13-15 September 1977. As coeditors, we have followed the normal editorial procedures of scholarly journals. We have obtained invaluable assistance from a number of colleagues who essentially performed the duties of associate editors, coordinating most of the reviews. All papers except those appearing in the Historica~ Perspectives section were refereed by at least two individuals with competency in the respective area. Because of the wide range and diversity of the topics, it would have been im possible for us to make a consistently rational selection of papers without the help of the associate editors and referees. We are indeed grateful to them. The breadth of extremal methods and systems analysis, suggested by the range of topics covered in these papers, is characteristic of the field and also of the scholarly work of Professor Charnes. Extre mal methods and systems analysis has been a pioneering and systematic approach to the development and application of new scientific theories and methods for problems of management and operations in both the pri vate and public sectors, spanning all major disciplines from economics to engineering.
Quantal Response Equilibrium presents a stochastic theory of games that unites probabilistic choice models developed in psychology and statistics with the Nash equilibrium approach of classical game theory. Nash equilibrium assumes precise and perfect decision making in games, but human behavior is inherently stochastic and people realize that the behavior of others is not perfectly predictable. In contrast, QRE models choice behavior as probabilistic and extends classical game theory into a more realistic and useful framework with broad applications for economics, political science, management, and other social sciences. Quantal Response Equilibrium spans the range from basic theoretical foundations to examples of how the principles yield useful predictions and insights in strategic settings, including voting, bargaining, auctions, public goods provision, and more. The approach provides a natural framework for estimating the effects of behavioral factors like altruism, reciprocity, risk aversion, judgment fallacies, and impatience. New theoretical results push the frontiers of models that include heterogeneity, learning, and well-specified behavioral modifications of rational choice and rational expectations. The empirical relevance of the theory is enhanced by discussion of data from controlled laboratory experiments, along with a detailed users' guide for estimation techniques. Quantal Response Equilibrium makes pioneering game-theoretic methods and interdisciplinary applications available to a wide audience.
It is an obvious fact that human agency is constrained and structured by many kinds of rules: rules that are constitutive for communication, morality, persons, and society, and juridical rules. So the question is: what roles are played by social rules and the structural traits of human agency in rational decision making? What bearing does this have on the theory of practical rationality? These issues can only be discussed within an interdisciplinary setting, with researchers drawn from philosophy, decision theory and the economic and social sciences. The problem is of profound, fundamental concern to the social scientist and has attracted a great deal of intellectual effort. Contributors include distinguished researchers in their respective fields and the book thus presents state-of-the-art theory. It can also be used as a textbook in advanced philosophy, economics and social science classes.
Game theory, the formalized study of strategy, began in the 1940s by asking how emotionless geniuses should play games, but ignored until recently how average people with emotions and limited foresight actually play games. This book marks the first substantial and authoritative effort to close this gap. Colin Camerer, one of the field's leading figures, uses psychological principles and hundreds of experiments to develop mathematical theories of reciprocity, limited strategizing, and learning, which help predict what real people and companies do in strategic situations. Unifying a wealth of information from ongoing studies in strategic behavior, he takes the experimental science of behavioral economics a major step forward. He does so in lucid, friendly prose. Behavioral game theory has three ingredients that come clearly into focus in this book: mathematical theories of how moral obligation and vengeance affect the way people bargain and trust each other; a theory of how limits in the brain constrain the number of steps of "I think he thinks . . ." reasoning people naturally do; and a theory of how people learn from experience to make better strategic decisions. Strategic interactions that can be explained by behavioral game theory include bargaining, games of bluffing as in sports and poker, strikes, how conventions help coordinate a joint activity, price competition and patent races, and building up reputations for trustworthiness or ruthlessness in business or life. While there are many books on standard game theory that address the way ideally rational actors operate, Behavioral Game Theory stands alone in blending experimental evidence and psychology in a mathematical theory of normal strategic behavior. It is must reading for anyone who seeks a more complete understanding of strategic thinking, from professional economists to scholars and students of economics, management studies, psychology, political science, anthropology, and biology.
This book grew out of a set of lecture notes for a one semester course on dynamic game theory held at the University of Technology, Vienna. It is intended primarily at the graduate level for students in operations research, management science, applied mathematics, and eco nomics. I hope that I have been able to give the reader an accessible introduction to the subject of nonzero-sum dif ferential games with particular emphasis on applications. It would be irrational to try to re ach total com prehensiveness in a single volume. Therefore, I have resisted the temptation to "over-cannibalize" previous textbooks and monographs on the subject. It has rather been my desire to cover material that (I think) is impor tant and interesting, but gets left out of these publications. Writing a book is quite a game. In the beginning -before c10sing the binding agreement* with Plenum-I believed this to be a fi·nite horizon game. Time, however, * Key words will be explained in the text. 7 PREFACE 8 was a merciless arbiter. I am grateful to the Senior Editor, Dr. Ken Derharn, for allowing manuscript delivery to become a (restricted) free terminal time problem. Most of all, I thank my wife Grace for offering me the needed spiritual support, and my two-year-old daughter Sabrina for ignoring the paradoxical situation that there are games which prevent Dad from playing with her.
This book focuses on the development of a theory of info-dynamics to support the theory of info-statics in the general theory of information. It establishes the rational foundations of information dynamics and how these foundations relate to the general socio-natural dynamics from the primary to the derived categories in the universal existence and from the potential to the actual in the ontological space. It also shows how these foundations relate to the general socio-natural dynamics from the potential to the possible to give rise to the possibility space with possibilistic thinking; from the possible to the probable to give rise to possibility space with probabilistic thinking; and from the probable to the actual to give rise to the space of knowledge with paradigms of thought in the epistemological space. The theory is developed to explain the general dynamics through various transformations in quality-quantity space in relation to the nature of information flows at each variety transformation. The theory explains the past-present-future connectivity of the evolving information structure in a manner that illuminates the transformation problem and its solution in the never-ending information production within matter-energy space under socio-natural technologies to connect the theory of info-statics, which in turn presents explanations to the transformation problem and its solution. The theoretical framework is developed with analytical tools based on the principle of opposites, systems of actual-potential polarities, negative-positive dualities under different time-structures with the use of category theory, fuzzy paradigm of thought and game theory in the fuzzy-stochastic cost-benefit space. The rational foundations are enhanced with categorial analytics. The value of the theory of info-dynamics is demonstrated in the explanatory and prescriptive structures of the transformations of varieties and categorial varieties at each point of time and over time from parent–offspring sequences. It constitutes a general explanation of dynamics of information-knowledge production through info-processes and info-processors induced by a socio-natural infinite set of technologies in the construction–destruction space.
