Games of Strategy

Rating:
Summary: Good and interesting introduction to game theory
Review: I really enjoyed this book. There were some areas where it was kind of confusing, but I found that overall it kept me interested. Their approach is good especially for those who want to learn about the topic and its applications but don't have much background in math or economics. Game theory is a really interesting field, and this text provides a good introduction for those who want to learn about it without getting bogged down in the math. The book does its best job I think in tying the principles to the real world.

Rating:
Summary: From a student perspective
Review: I used this book as a student in an undergraduate Game Theory course and have mixed feelings about it.

Positives: the book is written in a simple style with relatively good examples that promote conceptual understanding.

Negatives: the book is very poorly laid out. Some chapters don't seem to follow any logical progression, so the reader must frequently jump from one section to another. Additionally, the book doesn't utilize some fairly standard terms, and the index doesn't facilitate the book's use as a reference manual.

The reason I wrote this review was because I came online to try to find a better Game Theory textbook -- I ran into problem studying from this one.

Rating:
Summary: Why won't anyone just call it the Battle of the Sexes?
Review: I used this book for the second half of a principles of micro. course, to supplement the shoddy, one-chapter-on-the-Prisoners'-Dilemma treatment found in most principles textbooks. Everything said here should be interepreted according to this. From this instructor, the book gets points for being the best one available for teaching low-level undergraduates, but it could have been a LOT better. For example:

The notation and terminology are in many cases non-standard, and tend to change from chapter to chapter. The BoS is the Battle of Cultures (though this is not the first book to mess with this game). Chicken is a Game of Assurances, except in Ch. 10. SPE are (quasi-)formally described in Ch. 6, but they are actually introduced in Ch.4, where they are called Rollback Equilibria. Many times, I would have to tell students, "this is what your book calls a..."

The authors use confusing and convoluted examples to motivate concepts. For example, it takes a confusing, two-page story about advertizing in a political race to motivate study of sequential-move games. A simple entry-deterrence story gets the point across.

Also on this point, sequential-move games appear before simultaneous-move ones. I reversed this, in part ot be able to show that the set of SPE is merely a subset of the set of NE (again, using the entry-deterrence story). In fact, there's no real attempt to relate many of (seemingly unrelated) concepts to one another, as equilibrium refinements, each of which conforms to some intuitive concept of the "right" way of playing a given game.

The disucssion of the special case of two-person, zero-sum games, introducing pre-Nash notation and solution concepts is merely confusing for the uninitiated. I see no reason that anyone not yet in graduate school should have to know the min-max theorem.

In some ways, the books seems to suffer from over- and under-reach at the same time. The subject of infinitely repeated games gets two pages on TFT and Grim strategies in a repeated Prisoners' Dilema. There's no real discussion of rationalizability, or Bayesian games; many important concepts are smooshed into a couple of chapters, like they're being swept under the rug. There IS, however, a chapter on evolutionary games, and a (math-free) chapter on auctions.

Again, these are points that, I think, led to undue confusion, and required undue effort to counteract. However, I don't mean to be unduly harsh. I'm not suggesting that the authors should merely have mimeographed Fudenberg & Tirole, and whited-out the math. This is a useful book, ahead (as far as I know) of other treatments appropriate for students at this level. But it could have been much better.

Rating:
Summary: Why won't anyone just call it the Battle of the Sexes?
Review: I used this book for the second half of a principles of micro. course, to supplement the shoddy, one-chapter-on-the-Prisoners'-Dilemma treatment found in most principles textbooks. Everything said here should be interepreted according to this. From this instructor, the book gets points for being the best one available for teaching low-level undergraduates, but it could have been a LOT better. For example:

The notation and terminology are in many cases non-standard, and tend to change from chapter to chapter. The BoS is the Battle of Cultures (though this is not the first book to mess with this game). Chicken is a Game of Assurances, except in Ch. 10. SPE are (quasi-)formally described in Ch. 6, but they are actually introduced in Ch.4, where they are called Rollback Equilibria. Many times, I would have to tell students, "this is what your book calls a..."

The authors use confusing and convoluted examples to motivate concepts. For example, it takes a confusing, two-page story about advertizing in a political race to motivate study of sequential-move games. A simple entry-deterrence story gets the point across.

Also on this point, sequential-move games appear before simultaneous-move ones. I reversed this, in part ot be able to show that the set of SPE is merely a subset of the set of NE (again, using the entry-deterrence story). In fact, there's no real attempt to relate many of (seemingly unrelated) concepts to one another, as equilibrium refinements, each of which conforms to some intuitive concept of the "right" way of playing a given game.

The disucssion of the special case of two-person, zero-sum games, introducing pre-Nash notation and solution concepts is merely confusing for the uninitiated. I see no reason that anyone not yet in graduate school should have to know the min-max theorem.

In some ways, the books seems to suffer from over- and under-reach at the same time. The subject of infinitely repeated games gets two pages on TFT and Grim strategies in a repeated Prisoners' Dilema. There's no real discussion of rationalizability, or Bayesian games; many important concepts are smooshed into a couple of chapters, like they're being swept under the rug. There IS, however, a chapter on evolutionary games, and a (math-free) chapter on auctions.

Again, these are points that, I think, led to undue confusion, and required undue effort to counteract. However, I don't mean to be unduly harsh. I'm not suggesting that the authors should merely have mimeographed Fudenberg & Tirole, and whited-out the math. This is a useful book, ahead (as far as I know) of other treatments appropriate for students at this level. But it could have been much better.

Rating:
Summary: From a student perspective
Review: I used this book when teaching an undergraduate course in game theory at Smith College. The course had a one semester calculus prerequisite and no econ prerequisites. The book is fantastic. It makes material very accessiable to students. It provides very interesting examples.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Textbook
Review: I used this book when teaching an undergraduate course in game theory at Smith College. The course had a one semester calculus prerequisite and no econ prerequisites. The book is fantastic. It makes material very accessiable to students. It provides very interesting examples.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Starter
Review: I'm learning game theory on my own and found this book an excellent starter. The book provides a wide range of topics, building from what strategy means in game theory, to the sequential and simultanous play of games, to more specialized areas and applications of the theory.

Although it keeps the mathematics rather minimal, you'll need to do your own workings to better understand the text. To get more from this book, you'll need to be involved in the examples the book provides... breezing through may not help you understand the theory better.

While I do read other books on game theory, I find myself going back to Games of Strategy to review the basics and the examples. The example on the tennis game has provided me some starting ideas on the issues I've to face in some research areas I'm working on.

Rating:
Summary: bad book.....
Review: The author is a fine economist, but he's written a lousy textbook. The only positive is that it's easy (indeed, almost to the point of being simplistic) so the uninitiated can learn from it rather readily. But it takes away any positive it provides by being rather nonstandard in its terminology and notations. Plus, I doubt anyone taking a college-level game theory class would be so untrained so as to need this sort of babying. Finally, the contents don't justify the sky-high price.

If you need a good game theory text, buy Gintis for the intro. students and Osborne and Rubinstein for the reasonably advanced. These are affordable paperbacks that I think are as good as any hardcover. Don't waste money needlessly.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent practical introduction to game theory
Review: This book provides a very good introduction to game theory from a practical, application-oriented point of view. Readers who expect a thorough mathematical introduction should read other books (e.g. Fudenberg&Tirole). But readers who want to understand the essence of game theoretical thinking and want to learn about many real-life applications (e.g. cold war) will like this book.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent introduction to game theory
Review: This is a fantastic introduction to game theory. I'm in a graduate-level game theory course with a much more confusing textbook, and this one has enabled me to learn the concepts more clearly. Once I study the text and examples in Dixit & Skeath, I'm comfortable moving on to the harder problems in my other text. I definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in learning game theory -- you'll even get a few good laughs out of some of the examples and the authors' jokes.