Customer Reviews

Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Commemorative Edition) (Princeton Classic Editions)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I'm not even sure I'm qualified to pass judgement on this book, but what I understand, I give 5 stars without hesitation. The authors discuss almost every class of game (2-person, 3-person, zero-sum, non-zero-sum, etc.) and even a very simplified version of poker.

You basically have to be a mathematician to get full value from this book. This book is absolutely full of equations and complex proofs. For a beginner with little math, I'd recommend Game Theory by Morton Davis, or for someone with some university math I'd recommend Games and Decisions by Luce and Raiffa. However, if your math is good, you might as well go straight to this book, which started the whole field of game theory.

Let me start out by acknowledging that this is THE BOOK that started Game Theory as it exists today. While Bayesian statistics are an obvious precursor, everyone agrees that von Neumann's and Morgenstern's work was ground breaking.

That said, this is not the best written Game Theory text out there. Like all seminal works, it suffers from the basic fact that we've learned a lot of new things since the time it was written. Many people have gone on to build and expand on the insights contained in this book, especially in the area of bargaining and cooperative game theory.

This is a very impressive book to keep on your shelf, and the discussion of poker and the role of bluffing is very interesting, but, owing largely to the 60+ years that have passed since its initial publication, it's not the best reference work or study material available.

Another word of warning: The review below is correct that the level of math that you must understand to fully appreciate this book is quite substantial. This book is more for the mathematically sophisticated who want to develop an appreciation for the origins of game theory.

I am in the middle of this book now. I chose it because it was the first in this field. It presents so much information, it can overwhelming. Perhaps I should have chosen a simpler book for my first. Oh well, I will plod along. My limited math skills meas I miss out on a lot of the book, but the stuff in between the math is great and is helping me to better understand the ideas.

I'm giving it four stars. It is jam-packed with great research and the reader can learn quite a bit, but the heavy math emphasis makes it difficult for many to consume.

This book is a must for high level math or econ. majors. To truly understand all the math you need advanced calculus, but the book is still worth while if you only have a basic knowledge of math. The work von Neumann did was revolutionary, with game theory being a joke before this work. You should read it.

Like reading murky Elizabethan prose for this generation of game theorists.

Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (TGEB) is the Ur-text of game theory, and Morgenstern and von Neumann bridge the gap and make discoveries between logical positivism, formal logic, choice sets, number theory, and binomial and multinomial outcomes.

But in retrospect, this work is rather cumbersome and notation, because so much of it was new, is often baffling to those who have learned game theory from more modern lecturers: a lot of clarity and light has been shed on the field since this was written.

As brilliant as the insights of von Neumann, and to a lesser extent Morgenstern, were, they were building in response to the nearly simultaneous discoveries by Nash of a new sub-set of mathematics, and like all new fields the first expression needed editing and focus. For this is this work's flaw: it attempted as a first expression of a new field to be comprehensive. Whereas Nash's discovery of equilibrium was lean and concise, with profound reverberations throughout decision sciences, TGEB is bloated and sometimes misguided: economics is too huge a field, and even then the concept of homo economicus rationalis was crumbling under the discovery that people make suboptimal decisions all the time.

For those who are reading this for historical curiosity, I suggest William Poundstone's "Prisoner's Dilemma" in conjunction with TGEB, but frankly modern expressions of game theory in more abbreviated texts such as Harold Kuhn's works are actually better because they've cleaned out the dead ends and tightened up the notation and expression.

This book is very important for the quality of argument by two big personalities. The lecture is nice for the richness of particulars about several aspects of the theory. The student can understand the singular properties very cleary. The historical importance of this book is very strong.

Dear Readers

I'm going to love this book. In fact I love it so much I want to review it even before I even read it.

This is the first book I ever bought at least that I can remember by Von Neumann and it probably won't be the last. Yes and I'm proud to say from Amazon.

In the first chapter of the book the authors outline arguments for the construction of a new theory of economics/politics using a totally different approach than what has been tried before.

Section 2.1........................Rational Behavior

Section 3.1.....comes the key notion of utility.........and from this directly comes the "metric".

This concept is the key to understanding perhaps all social behavior that before this could not be accurately described

mathematically.

Of course when you say Economic behavior you could mean anything. Including of course "War". Any decision, any choice any game in which you can win, lose, draw or get something or lose something.

I intend to mean game in the widest sense. Even choosing the medicine you take.

sjw

I was very happy with book I received. Book was as described and shipped very fast. Thank You!