Edward C. Rosenthal

Finally, someone got it right!

Game theory is one of the most fascinating areas of mathematics, with both recreational and practical uses. What's more, it's relatively easy -- you can use it without knowing calculus or any other area of advanced mathematics. And it can be useful in everyday life.

It would seem obvious that there should be an elementary primer on the topic. And there have been attempts at such -- Davis's Game Theory: A Non-Technical Introduction and Binmore's Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction spring to mind. Yet Binmore's book, while good given its scope, is too short, and Davis is hard to follow.

Most other introductions to the field suffer from being too axiomatic (I'm thinking here of Robert Gibbons's horrendous Game Theory for Applied Economists, which seems to think that demonstrating how to actually use game theory is beneath contempt) or from being too specialized (William Poundstone's Prisoner's Dilemma is readable but obviously mostly about one particular game).

Rosenthal's volume, despite the obnoxious series title, finally gets it right. It glides rather lightly over the fundamental propositions, which in a way is sad, but it does so to get into the guts of using game theory. And it covers most of the field's myriad applications -- biology and evolutionarily stable strategies; economics; politics; social interactions.

I bought this book because a friend of mine is taking a college class in game theory, and the text (the Gibbons book alluded to above) was so totally useless. Neither my friend nor I could get anything out of it. So we started using this as our reference. It has been a tremendous help. Too bad the title means that we can't recommend it to the professor as his text for next year....… (meer)