Game Theory And Its Application To The Social Sciences

The second edition of Herve Moulin's highly successful book outlines the fundamental concepts of game theory—one of the most provocative and fruitful applications of mathematics to the human sciences—and demonstrates its uses in economic and political discourse. Thoroughly revised, and now published with an accompanying workbook of 89 exercises, this rigorous yet accessible test explains the uses of game theory in largely nontechnical terms. Moulin carefully discusses the behavioral scenarios underlying the various equilibrium concepts. He provides a self-contained exposition of basic equilibrium concepts for strategic games: perfect (sophisticated) equilibrium, Nash's noncooperative example, Aumann's strong and correlated example, and several versions of the core. The author is concerned less with mathematical refinements than with helping the reader understand the strategic stories backing these concepts. HIs examples therefore give a fair account of the current game models used in economics, politics, and sociology. Addressed here are oligopoly theory, the provision of public gtoods, auctions, voting procedures, and cost allocation problems, as well as the classic prisoner's dilemma, tic-tac-toe, and Marienbad games. Extremely popular in its original French edition and in its first English version, Moulin's excellent introductory text is now, more than ever, the book to answer the essential questions about the application of game theory to the social sciences.

Game Theory and Experimental Games: The Study of Strategic Interaction focuses on the development of game theory, taking into consideration empirical research, theoretical formulations, and research procedures involved. The book proceeds with a discussion on the theory of one-person games. The individual decision that a player makes in these kinds of games is noted as influential as to the outcome of these games. This discussion is followed by a presentation of pure coordination games and minimal situation. The ability of players to anticipate the choices of others to achieve a mutually beneficial outcome is emphasized. A favorable social situation is also influential in these kinds of games. The text moves forward by presenting studies on various kinds of competitive games. The research studies presented are coupled with empirical evidence and discussion designed to support the claims that are pointed out. The book also discusses several kinds of approaches in the study of games. Voting as a way to resolve multi-person games is also emphasized, including voting procedures, the preferences of voters, and voting strategies. The book is a valuable source of data for readers and scholars who are interested in the exploration of game theories.

This book integrates the fundamentals, methodology, and major application fields of noncooperative and cooperative games including conflict resolution. The topics addressed in the book are discrete and continuous games including games represented by finite trees; matrix and bimatrix games as well as oligopolies; cooperative solution concepts; games under uncertainty; dynamic games and conflict resolution. The methodology is illustrated by carefully chosen examples, applications and case studies which are selected from economics, social sciences, engineering, the military and homeland security. This book is highly recommended to readers who are interested in the in-depth and up-to-date integration of the theory and ever-expanding application areas of game theory.

Individuals, firms, governments and nations behave strategically, for good and bad. Over the last few decades, game theory has been constructed and progressively refined to become the major tool used by social scientists to understand, predict and regulate strategic interaction among agents who often have conflicting interests. In the surprisingly anodyne jargon of the theory, they ‘play games’. This book offers an introduction to the basic tools of game theory and an overview of a number of applications to real-world cases, covering the areas of economics, politics and international relations. Each chapter is accompanied by some suggestions about further reading.

​This book both summarizes the basic theory of evolutionary games and explains their developing applications, giving special attention to the 2-player, 2-strategy game. This game, usually termed a "2×2 game” in the jargon, has been deemed most important because it makes it possible to posit an archetype framework that can be extended to various applications for engineering, the social sciences, and even pure science fields spanning theoretical biology, physics, economics, politics, and information science. The 2×2 game is in fact one of the hottest issues in the field of statistical physics. The book first shows how the fundamental theory of the 2×2 game, based on so-called replicator dynamics, highlights its potential relation with nonlinear dynamical systems. This analytical approach implies that there is a gap between theoretical and reality-based prognoses observed in social systems of humans as well as in those of animal species. The book explains that this perceived gap is the result of an underlying reciprocity mechanism called social viscosity. As a second major point, the book puts a sharp focus on network reciprocity, one of the five fundamental mechanisms for adding social viscosity to a system and one that has been a great concern for study by statistical physicists in the past decade. The book explains how network reciprocity works for emerging cooperation, and readers can clearly understand the existence of substantial mechanics when the term "network reciprocity" is used. In the latter part of the book, readers will find several interesting examples in which evolutionary game theory is applied. One such example is traffic flow analysis. Traffic flow is one of the subjects that fluid dynamics can deal with, although flowing objects do not comprise a pure fluid but, rather, are a set of many particles. Applying the framework of evolutionary games to realistic traffic flows, the book reveals that social dilemma structures lie behind traffic flow.

The mathematical study of games is an intriguing endeavor with implications and applications that reach far beyond tic-tac-toe, chess, and poker to economics, business, and even biology and politics. Most texts on the subject, however, are written at the graduate level for those with strong mathematics, economics, or business backgrounds. In a clear and refreshing departure from this trend, Introducing Game Theory and its Applications presents an easy-to-read introduction to the basic ideas and techniques of game theory. After a brief introduction, the author begins with a chapter devoted to combinatorial games--a topic neglected or treated minimally in most other texts. The focus then shifts to two-person zero-sum games and their solution. Here the author presents the simplex method, based on linear programming, for solving these games and develops within his presentation the required background in linear programming. The final chapter presents some of the fundamental ideas and tools of non-zero-sum games and games with more than two players, including an introduction to cooperative game theory. This book will not only satisfy the curiosity of those whose interest in the subject was piqued by the 1994 Nobel Prize awarded to Harsanyi, Nash, and Selten. It also prepares its readers for more advanced study of game theory's applications in economics, business, and the physical, biological, and social sciences.