Playing for Real: A Text on Game Theory / Edition 1

by Ken Binmore

Overview

Ken Binmore's previous game theory textbook, Fun and Games (D.C. Heath, 1991), carved out a significant niche in the advanced undergraduate market; it was intellectually serious and more up-to-date than its competitors, but also accessibly written. Its central thesis was that game theory allows us to understand many kinds of interactions between people, a point that Binmore amply demonstrated through a rich range of examples and applications. This replacement for the now out-of-date 1991 textbook retains the entertaining examples, but changes the organization to match how game theory courses are actually taught, making Playing for Real a more versatile text that almost all possible course designs will find easier to use, with less jumping about than before. In addition, the problem sections, already used as a reference by many teachers, have become even more clever and varied, without becoming too technical. Playing for Real will sell into advanced undergraduate courses in game theory, primarily those in economics, but also courses in the social sciences, and serve as a reference for economists.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195300574
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	03/29/2007
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	656
Product dimensions:	10.00(w) x 7.30(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

Ken Binmore is a mathematician-turned-economist who has devoted his life to the theory of games and its applications in economics, evolutionary biology, psychology, and moral philosophy. He is well known for his part in designing the telecom auction that raised $35 billion for the British taxpayer, but his major research contributions are to the theory of bargaining and its testing in the laboratory. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of 12 books and some 90 research papers. He is Emeritus Professor of Economics at University College London.

Table of Contents

Lecture 1: Getting Locked In
In this introductory lecture, a famous game called the Prisoners' Dilemma is introduced and used to illustrate how game theory can be used to clarify a variety of strategic problems. The idea of a Nash equilibrium makes its first appearance.

Lecture 2: Backing Up
This chapter starts to explain how one can specify the rules of a game by introducing the idea of a game tree. We learn how some games can be solved by backward induction.

Lecture 3: Taking Chances
Chance moves are introduced. Bayes rule for updating conditional probabilities appears for the first time.

Lecture 4: Accounting for Tastes
We learn that a rational player in a risky situation will behave as though maximizing the expected value of a Von Neumann and Morgenstern utility function.

Lecture 5: Planning Ahead
The ideas of an extensive and strategic form of a game are consolidated. We learn the mechanics of successively deleting dominated strategies.

Lecture 6: Mixing Things Up
Rational players will sometimes need to randomoize their strategy choice to keep their opponents guessing. This chapter explains how to work with such mixed strategies.

Lecture 7: Buying Cheap and Selling Dear
This chapter is an introduction to the use of game theory in economics. Students of economics will find most topics are treated from a different angle than they have probably seem before.

Lecture 8: Repeating Yourself
Most of the games we play in real life are repeated over and over again. This makes a big difference to how they get played.

Lecture 9: Getting Together
This chapter applies game theory to bargaining.

Lecture 10: Knowing What to Believe
One of the big successes of game theory lies in its ability to handle some situations in which players have good reason to conceal information from each other.

Lecture 11: Taking Charge
This lecture is an optional extra about auctions and mechanism design. It can serve as a possible substitute for Lecture 8 or 9.

Editorial Reviews

"Ken Binmore is an outstanding exponent of game theory. His many books are written in a delightfully fresh and engaging style, as is this one. Enjoy!"—Robert Aumann, Center for the Study of Rationality, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences, 2005

"Delightfully written and thoroughly revised, this long-awaited intellectual child of Ken Binmore's Fun and Games retains the solid foundation of the original while expanding to cover an impressive array of new ideas. It stands out among game theory texts in explaining not only how to do game theory, but when and why to do it. It is the ideal place to learn game theory for the first time or to gain a fresh perspective on ideas that a career's work have made familiar." —Larry Samuelson, University of Wisconsin

"One of the world's leading game theorists explains the subject with sparkle and wit. He challenges the reader to think deeply about strategic rationality without becoming esoteric, and shows how the theory illuminates down-to-earth topics like gambling, auctions, business competition, and game show contests. A gem of a book written by a master." —Peyton Young, Scott and Barbara Black Professor of Economics, Johns Hopkins University, and Professor of Economics, University of Oxford

From the Publisher