Name: Game Theory
ISBN: 9780199218462

Game Theory

Games are played whenever people interact, wherever there are strategies to adopt and outcomes or prizes to win. And that means games are played everywhere: from economics to evolutionary biology, from prison escapes to online poker, and from romantic liaisons to Cold War stand-offs. Game theory is the study of such games — what happens when they are played rationally, and how we can predict their outcomes. This lively Very Short Introduction shows how game theory can be understood without mathematical equations, and how, from one simple premise, there springs a remarkably rich theory that has already had a profound effect on the sciences, and may yet revolutionize disciplines as far apart as psychology, ethics, and politics.

What Hacker News says

Claude_ShannonFeb 2022

How about a book from VSI series, Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction by Ken Binmore? While I haven't read that one in particular, VSI series are quite cheap and most of the time of a good quality.

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dombiliDec 2017

Thinking Strategically by Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff is a fantastic way to start. You can pick it up without any prior knowledge of game theory.

I'd also recommend Ken Binmore's Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction.

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jseligerJun 2010

This situation makes up a good portion of an intro game theory course - the section is usually titled "games with asymmetric information", the problem is described as "the market for lemons", and the solution is described as "signaling devices", all of which are ridiculously un-Googlable terms, unfortunately.

If you want to learn more about this, check out Ken Binmore's Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction, which is pretty readable, and one of the major original books, Theory of games and economic behavior, by John Von Neumann.

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