The World the Game Theorists Made
The World the Game Theorists Made

Author: Paul Erickson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-11-04

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 022609720X

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In recent decades game theory—the mathematics of rational decision-making by interacting individuals—has assumed a central place in our understanding of capitalist markets, the evolution of social behavior in animals, and even the ethics of altruism and fairness in human beings. With game theory’s ubiquity, however, has come a great deal of misunderstanding. Critics of the contemporary social sciences view it as part of an unwelcome trend toward the marginalization of historicist and interpretive styles of inquiry, and many accuse its proponents of presenting a thin and empirically dubious view of human choice. The World the Game Theorists Made seeks to explain the ascendency of game theory, focusing on the poorly understood period between the publication of John von Neumann and Oscar Morgenstern’s seminal Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in 1944 and the theory’s revival in economics in the 1980s. Drawing on a diverse collection of institutional archives, personal correspondence and papers, and interviews, Paul Erickson shows how game theory offered social scientists, biologists, military strategists, and others a common, flexible language that could facilitate wide-ranging thought and debate on some of the most critical issues of the day.

How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind
How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind

Author: Paul Erickson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013-11-22

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 022604677X

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In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. Its home was the human sciences—psychology, sociology, political science, and economics, among others—and its participants enlisted in an intellectual campaign to figure out what rationality should mean and how it could be deployed. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind brings to life the people—Herbert Simon, Oskar Morgenstern, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas Schelling, and many others—and places, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that played a key role in putting forth a “Cold War rationality.” Decision makers harnessed this picture of rationality—optimizing, formal, algorithmic, and mechanical—in their quest to understand phenomena as diverse as economic transactions, biological evolution, political elections, international relations, and military strategy. The authors chronicle and illuminate what it meant to be rational in the age of nuclear brinkmanship.

Jane Austen, Game Theorist
Jane Austen, Game Theorist

Author: Michael Suk-Young Chwe

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2014-03-23

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0691162441

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How the works of Jane Austen show that game theory is present in all human behavior Game theory—the study of how people make choices while interacting with others—is one of the most popular technical approaches in social science today. But as Michael Chwe reveals in his insightful new book, Jane Austen explored game theory's core ideas in her six novels roughly two hundred years ago—over a century before its mathematical development during the Cold War. Jane Austen, Game Theorist shows how this beloved writer theorized choice and preferences, prized strategic thinking, and analyzed why superiors are often strategically clueless about inferiors. Exploring a diverse range of literature and folktales, this book illustrates the wide relevance of game theory and how, fundamentally, we are all strategic thinkers.

Game Theory
Game Theory

Author: Michael Maschler

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-06-25

Total Pages: 1053

ISBN-13: 1108493459

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This new edition is unparalleled in breadth of coverage, thoroughness of technical explanations and number of worked examples.

Classics in Game Theory
Classics in Game Theory

Author: Harold William Kuhn

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-11-10

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 1400829151

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Classics in Game Theory assembles in one sourcebook the basic contributions to the field that followed on the publication of Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern (Princeton, 1944). The theory of games, first given a rigorous formulation by von Neumann in a in 1928, is a subfield of mathematics and economics that models situations in which individuals compete and cooperate with each other. In the "heroic era" of research that began in the late 1940s, the foundations of the current theory were laid; it is these fundamental contributions that are collected in this volume. In the last fifteen years, game theory has become the dominant model in economic theory and has made significant contributions to political science, biology, and international security studies. The central role of game theory in economic theory was recognized by the award of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1994 to the pioneering game theorists John C. Harsanyi, John Nash, and Reinhard Selten. The fundamental works for which they were honored are all included in this volume. Harold Kuhn, himself a major contributor to game theory for his reformulation of extensive games, has chosen eighteen essays that constitute the core of game theory as it exists today. Drawn from a variety of sources, they will be an invaluable tool for researchers in game theory and for a broad group of students of economics, political science, and biology.

Rock, Paper, Scissors
Rock, Paper, Scissors

Author: Len Fisher

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2008-11-04

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0786726938

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Praised by Entertainment Weekly as “the man who put the fizz into physics,” Dr. Len Fisher turns his attention to the science of cooperation in his lively and thought-provoking book. Fisher shows how the modern science of game theory has helped biologists to understand the evolution of cooperation in nature, and investigates how we might apply those lessons to our own society. In a series of experiments that take him from the polite confines of an English dinner party to crowded supermarkets, congested Indian roads, and the wilds of outback Australia, not to mention baseball strategies and the intricacies of quantum mechanics, Fisher sheds light on the problem of global cooperation. The outcomes are sometimes hilarious, sometimes alarming, but always revealing. A witty romp through a serious science, Rock, Paper, Scissors will both teach and delight anyone interested in what it what it takes to get people to work together.

Disputed Decisions of World War II
Disputed Decisions of World War II

Author: Mark Thompson

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2020-01-17

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 1476638381

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A former Harvard professor of decision science and game theory draws on those disciplines in this review of controversial strategic and tactical decisions of World War II. Allied leaders--although outstanding in many ways--sometimes botched what now is termed meta-decision making or deciding how to decide. Operation Jubilee, a single-division raid on Dieppe, France, in August 1942, for example, illustrated the pitfalls of groupthink. In the Allied invasion of North Africa three months later, American and British leaders fell victim to the planning fallacy: having unrealistically rosy expectations of an easy victory. In Sicily in the summer of 1943, they violated the millennia-old principle of command unity--now re-endorsed and elaborated on by modern theorists. Had Allied strategists understood the game theory of bluffing, in January 1944 they might well not have landed two-plus divisions at Anzio in Italy.

The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life
The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

Author: Avinash K. Dixit

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2010-01-04

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 9780393069952

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“I am hard pressed to think of another book that can match the combination of practical insights and reading enjoyment.”—Steven Levitt Game theory means rigorous strategic thinking. It’s the art of anticipating your opponent’s next moves, knowing full well that your rival is trying to do the same thing to you. Though parts of game theory involve simple common sense, much is counterintuitive, and it can only be mastered by developing a new way of seeing the world. Using a diverse array of rich case studies—from pop culture, TV, movies, sports, politics, and history—the authors show how nearly every business and personal interaction has a game-theory component to it. Mastering game theory will make you more successful in business and life, and this lively book is the key to that mastery.

The Language of Game Theory
The Language of Game Theory

Author: Adam Brandenburger

Publisher: World Scientific

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 981451344X

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This volume contains eight papers written by Adam Brandenburger and his co-authors over a period of 25 years. These papers are part of a program to reconstruct game theory in order to make how players reason about a game a central feature of the theory. The program OCo now called epistemic game theory OCo extends the classical definition of a game model to include not only the game matrix or game tree, but also a description of how the players reason about one another (including their reasoning about other players' reasoning). With this richer mathematical framework, it becomes possible to determine the implications of how players reason for how a game is played. Epistemic game theory includes traditional equilibrium-based theory as a special case, but allows for a wide range of non-equilibrium behavior. Sample Chapter(s). Foreword (39 KB). Introduction (132 KB). Chapter 1: An Impossibility Theorem on Beliefs in Games (299 KB). Contents: An Impossibility Theorem on Beliefs in Games (Adam Brandenburger and H Jerome Keisler); Hierarchies of Beliefs and Common Knowledge (Adam Brandenburger and Eddie Dekel); Rationalizability and Correlated Equilibria (Adam Brandenburger and Eddie Dekel); Intrinsic Correlation in Games (Adam Brandenburger and Amanda Friedenberg); Epistemic Conditions for Nash Equilibrium (Robert Aumann and Adam Brandenburger); Lexicographic Probabilities and Choice Under Uncertainty (Lawrence Blume, Adam Brandenburger, and Eddie Dekel); Admissibility in Games (Adam Brandenburger, Amanda Friedenberg and H Jerome Keisler); Self-Admissible Sets (Adam Brandenburger and Amanda Friedenberg). Readership: Graduate students and researchers in the fields of game theory, theoretical computer science, mathematical logic and social neuroscience."

Game Theory, Alive
Game Theory, Alive

Author: Anna R. Karlin

Publisher: American Mathematical Soc.

Published: 2017-04-27

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1470419823

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We live in a highly connected world with multiple self-interested agents interacting and myriad opportunities for conflict and cooperation. The goal of game theory is to understand these opportunities. This book presents a rigorous introduction to the mathematics of game theory without losing sight of the joy of the subject. This is done by focusing on theoretical highlights (e.g., at least six Nobel Prize winning results are developed from scratch) and by presenting exciting connections of game theory to other fields such as computer science (algorithmic game theory), economics (auctions and matching markets), social choice (voting theory), biology (signaling and evolutionary stability), and learning theory. Both classical topics, such as zero-sum games, and modern topics, such as sponsored search auctions, are covered. Along the way, beautiful mathematical tools used in game theory are introduced, including convexity, fixed-point theorems, and probabilistic arguments. The book is appropriate for a first course in game theory at either the undergraduate or graduate level, whether in mathematics, economics, computer science, or statistics. The importance of game-theoretic thinking transcends the academic setting—for every action we take, we must consider not only its direct effects, but also how it influences the incentives of others.