Game Theory

This is a fantastic book on game theory that takes a more analytical and critical approach to the discipline itself. The authors not only explain the premises and theories, but also bring up the limitations and shortcomings of the accepted models. Clever, well-organized, with excellent examples and just the right proportion of math, philosophy, social psychology, and humor.

The second edition of this book has the benefit of significant improvements on the first edition. The first was criticized for being incorrect at times; the second book is revised and improved. Generally, the book gives a detailed examination of game theory including all the essential elements. Its applications to the moral, political, and philosophic ideas are well developed and extremely interesting. "The book takes several detours to offer useful expositions of terms and debates such as methodological individualism, common knowledge, equilibrium, learning, morality, norms, etc." as the last review said. These detours prove worthwhile.The book is difficult to follow and poorly organized, in my opinion. It takes significant work to find the essential ideas and suffers from a lack of "introduction". For those unfamiliar with game theory there are many introductory texts that give a better presentation of the basic ideas without having to work as hard. One of these I find particularly helpful is available online (I had found it for free): Game Theory by Turocy and von Stengel which was used as the introductory survey for the Encyclopedia of Information and Systems. Lawyers may find a short pamphlet produced by Kaplow and Shavell "Decision analysis, Game theory, and Information" quite a useful and practical introduction. The advantage of these texts is their length; both can be read within an couple of hours. Also, both of these provide a bibliography for further reading. For the mathematically inclined, the comprehensive treatment by Fudenberg and Tirole, Game Theory, is a classic for a reason.This book is a worthwhile text and can spark significant thought and suggest great research; however, I fear it could scare too many off as an introduction to the (amazing) world of games.

This is an excellent book. An introduction to game theory for those who approach the field with some skepticism. The book gives you all the important essential elements of non-cooperative and evolutionary game theory but with a much deeper emphasis on understanding its essential methodological and philosophical underpinnings yet without too much formalism. The authors do a superb job of introducing the topics via a tour of important moral, political, and philosophical ideas and debates mentioning Marx, Smith, Hobbes, Habermas, Hume, Locke and others. The book takes several detours to offer useful expositions of terms and debates such as methodological individualism, common knowledge, equilibrium, learning, morality, norms, etc. I'd recommend this book for two types of people: (1) those who plan to read just one book about game theory (because you don't think it's your cup of tea); and (2) those who plan on learning game theory rigorously (so that you can get a picture of the forest before getting lost in the trees). This is not just one of my favorite books amongst the several books that I have read on game theory and mechanism design, but also one of the most thumbed book in my entire book collection.

No reason to give money for a political failure like Varoufakis. You might find some introductory material on the same level of quality like this on Wikipedia or what have you, but his abyssmal try to talk down the importance of game theory is a joke.

There is not much to be said. The writing style is explanatory and exploratory. Really it's all you could ask for from an academic book! About 1/4th of the book covers core Game Theory ideas and then moves onto more advanced topics. It even criticizes itself, which is really appreciated.