A Gentle Introduction to Game Theory

ISBN-13: 9780821813393 / Angielski / Miękka / 1998

Saul Stahl

Opis

The mathematical theory of games was first developed as a model for situations of conflict, whether actual or recreational. It gained widespread recognition when it was applied to the theoretical study of economics by von Neumann and Morgenstern in Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in the 1940s. The later bestowal, in 1994, of the Nobel Prize in Economics on Nash underscores the important role this theory has played in the intellectual life of the 20th century. This volume is based on courses given by the author at the University of Kansas. The exposition is gentle because it requires only some knowledge of coordinate geometry; linear programming is not used. It is mathematical because it is more concerned with the mathematical solution of games than with their applications. Existing textbooks on the topic tend to focus either on the applications or on the mathematics at a level that makes the works inaccessible to most non-mathematicians. This book seeks to fit between these two alternatives. It discusses examples and completely solves them with tools that require no more than high school algebra.