Playing for Real

Game theory makes sense of a wide variety of human interactions, as Ken Binmore amply demonstrates in Playing for Real with a rich range of examples and applications. This new book is a replacement for Binmore's previous game theory textbook, Fun and Games. It is a light-hearted introduction to game theory suitable for advanced undergraduate students or beginning graduate students. It aims to answer three questions. What is game theory? How is game theory applied? Why is game theory...
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Game theory makes sense of a wide variety of human interactions, as Ken Binmore amply demonstrates in Playing for Real with a rich range of examples and applications. This new book is a replacement for Binmore's previous game theory textbook, Fun and Games. It is a light-hearted introduction to game theory suitable for advanced undergraduate students or beginning graduate students. It aims to answer three questions. What is game theory? How is game theory applied? Why is game theory right? It is the only book that tackles all three questions seriously without getting heavily mathematical. Topics covered include bargaining theory, imperfect competition, cooperative games, Bayesian decision theory, games of incomplete information, mechanism design, and auction theory. This book is suitable for students from a variety of disciplines, including economics, mathematics, and philosophy. Where necessary, standard topics in all three of these subjects are reviewed for the benefit of students from other disciplines. An important feature of the book is the large number of exercises, for which solutions are available.