These pages originated in 1994 with the first offering at Drexel
University of an undergraduate game theory course, an Honors
Colloquium.
The second offering of my honors colloquium in 1997 caused
me to consider a major rewriting and extension of it, which would
incorporate more
of the theory background for the examples, and some new ideas and
examples. This led to a textbook, with the result that most of the new
material was never offered online. Nevertheless, in about 2000 I
returned the the existing
essays in this slightly changed form, moved mostly by the number and
passion of the
requests users have sent me. Well, the number, anyway. It had also
seemed that there
were errors to correct, and there were some, the original having been
done in a great
hurry; and in some of these cases I have taken the time to verify that
the original
was correct. If I have missed any substantive errors, please let me
know. So these pages join the mass of Web documents that are
perpetually "under
construction."
| Roger McCain's Game Theory: A Nontechnical Introduction to the Analysis of Strategy is out of print, as of the spring of 2008. A revised edition is forthcoming from World Scienific Publishers, probably early next year. |
Fifty years old and newly prominent, thanks to the 1994 Nobel Memorial prize to Nash, Selten and Harsanyi; and to the 2005 prize to Aumann and Schelling and the 2007 prize that honored Maskin and Myerson, whose work is largely game theoretic, along with Hurwicz; game theory and its application to economics are finding their way into undergraduate curricula. The accessibility of the texts available has improved accordingly. However, as I began to teach game theory to students who, while very good students, mostly are not economics majors, I felt that the available texts are still not really accessible enough. More advanced game theory has been extensively covered elsewhere. Morton Davis' Game Theory: A Non-Technical Introduction seems to remain the only discussion at quite the right level of accessibility, but its range of coverage is no longer quite what I need, and never was really geared to economics.
Accordingly, this document may be useful as a supplement to the existing texts, as a means of making the basic ideas a bit more accessible. Anyway, that is the objective. Accordingly, I have tried to limit these pages to fairly elementary topics and to avoid mathematics other than numerical tables and a very little algebra. The presentation is as intuitive as I have been able to make it, and keep it brief. I welcome suggestions as to how to make it better.
Roger A. McCain 