The perfect balance of readability and formalism. Joel Watson has refined his successful text to make it even more student-friendly. A number of sections have been added, and numerous chapters have been substantially revised. Dozens of new exercises have been added, along with solutions to selected exercises. Chapters are short and focused, with just the right amount of mathematical content and end-of-chapter exercises. New passages walk students through tricky topics.

A clear, comprehensive introduction to the study of game theory. In the fourth edition, new real-world examples and compelling end-of-chapter exercises engage students with game theory.

The objective of the third edition of Game Theory: A Nontechnical Introduction to the Analysis of Strategy is to introduce the ideas of game theory in a way that is approachable, intuitive, and interdisciplinary. Relying on the Karplus Learning Cycle, the book is intended to teach by example. Noncooperative equilibrium concepts such as Nash equilibrium play the central role. In this third edition, increased stress is placed on the concept of rationalizable strategies, which has proven in teaching practice to assist students in making the bridge from intuitive to more formal concepts of noncooperative equilibrium.The Instructor Manual and PowerPoint Slides for the book are available upon request for all instructors who adopt this book as a course text. Please send your request to sales@wspc.com.

As with the previous editions, this fourth edition relies on teaching by example and the Karplus Learning Cycle to convey the ideas of game theory in a way that is approachable, intuitive, and interdisciplinary. Noncooperative equilibrium concepts such as Nash equilibrium, mixed strategy equilibria, and subgame perfect equilibrium are systematically introduced in the first half of the book. Bayesian Nash equilibrium is briefly introduced. The subsequent chapters discuss cooperative solutions with and without side payments, rationalizable strategies and correlated equilibria, and applications to elections, social mechanism design, and larger-scale games. New examples include panic buying, supply-chain shifts in the pandemic, and global warming.

An exciting new edition of the popular introduction to game theory and its applications The thoroughly expanded Second Edition presents a unique, hands-on approach to game theory. While most books on the subject are too abstract or too basic for mathematicians, Game Theory: An Introduction, Second Edition offers a blend of theory and applications, allowing readers to use theory and software to create and analyze real-world decision-making models. With a rigorous, yet accessible, treatment of mathematics, the book focuses on results that can be used to determine optimal game strategies. Game Theory: An Introduction, Second Edition demonstrates how to use modern software, such as MapleTM, Mathematica®, and Gambit, to create, analyze, and implement effective decision-making models. Coverage includes the main aspects of game theory including the fundamentals of two-person zero-sum games, cooperative games, and population games as well as a large number of examples from various fields, such as economics, transportation, warfare, asset distribution, political science, and biology. The Second Edition features: • A new chapter on extensive games, which greatly expands the implementation of available models • New sections on correlated equilibria and exact formulas for three-player cooperative games • Many updated topics including threats in bargaining games and evolutionary stable strategies • Solutions and methods used to solve all odd-numbered problems • A companion website containing the related Maple and Mathematica data sets and code A trusted and proven guide for students of mathematics and economics, Game Theory: An Introduction, Second Edition is also an excellent resource for researchers and practitioners in economics, finance, engineering, operations research, statistics, and computer science.

Game Theory: A Simple Introduction offers an accessible and enjoyable guide to the basic principles and extensive applications of game theory. Understand a game matrix, the prisoners’ dilemma, dominant and mixed strategies, zero-sum games, Pareto efficiency, the Nash equilibrium, and the power of asymmetric information. Calculate payoffs and outcomes in games involving characters such as Jack and Jill, or friend and stranger. Look at the effects of altruism and hatred on games, and see how games can change over time. Explore examples looking at gang members, free riders, global governance, a long-term relationship, competing corporations, advertisers and their customers, along with familiar hawk-dove and chicken games. See game players use every trick in the book to get what they want, with over 50 images to guide through the steps they use to play the game.

This book is an introduction to mathematical game theory, which might better be called the mathematical theory of conflict and cooperation. It is applicable whenever two individuals—or companies, or political parties, or nations—confront situations where the outcome for each depends on the behavior of all. What are the best strategies in such situations? If there are chances of cooperation, with whom should you cooperate, and how should you share the proceeds of cooperation? Since its creation by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in 1944, game theory has shed new light on business, politics, economics, social psychology, philosophy, and evolutionary biology. In this book, its fundamental ideas are developed with mathematics at the level of high school algebra and applied to many of these fields (see the table of contents). Ideas like “fairness” are presented via axioms that fair allocations should satisfy; thus the reader is introduced to axiomatic thinking as well as to mathematical modeling of actual situations.

This book is intended as an introduction to game theory which goes beyond the field of application, economics, and which introduces the reader to as many different sides of game theory as possible within the limitations of an introduction. The main goal is to give an impression of the diversity of game theoretical models, while at the same time covering the standard topics. The book has an equal coverage of non-cooperative and cooperative games, and it covers several topics such as selecting Nash equilibria, non-transferable utility games, applications of game theory to logic, combinatorial and differential games.