V.A. Vasil'ev and E.B. Yanovskaya 1 Game theory in the USSR before 1990 In this introductory chapter ?rst a short historical information about the development of game theory in the USSR before the 1990s is given. It should help to understand the choice of the papers in this volume. The development of game theory in the USSR began in the early sixties. N.N.Vorob'ev (1925- 1995) was the author of the ?rst papers about game theory in Russian; he was also the leader of a group of PhD students and young researchers at Leningrad who studied this new ?eldinmathematics. The early papers by Vorob'ev...

The study of the theory of games was started in Von Neumann (1928), but the development of the theory of games was accelerated after the publication of the classical book "Theory of games and economic behavior" by Von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944). As an initial step, the theory of games aims to put situations of conflict and cooperation into mathematical models. In the second and final step, the resulting models are analysed on the basis of equitable and mathematical reasonings. The conflict and/or cooperative situation in question is generally due to the interaction between two or more...